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“... to knit again/This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf.’ Of course ‘scattered corn’ is far more likely to suggest the grain of Shakespeare’s native Warwickshire than the rare exotic his contemporaries called ‘Indian corn’ and while Griffiths’s identification of the other three figures as John Gerard, his patron Lord Burghley and his ...”

“... claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those of Thomas Jefferson. What, if anything, does make the claim simply true must be the rationally-interpreted place of human beings within the order (or disorder) of nature. If all human beings do simply have rights, that is to say, these rights must be natural ...”

“... was plenty of violence at a local level, and although no members of the family were killed it was more luck than circumstance that preserved them; a well-padded doublet proved useful even on the streets of Norwich. And the sentimentality, if not the sex, largely came second to economic considerations. The Pastons were minor Norfolk gentry who were doing their ...”

“... The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not intrinsically more ‘real’. Time radiates in two directions, or dimensions, from this encounter: as a mirage belonging to the past dissolves, knowledge from the future comes into play. The narrator, who will become Bergotte’s close friend, now tells us things about him ...”

“... language as such for its continuance. The idea of the language as something already recovered was more attractive than the immense labour of actually recovering it. The tendency to idolise as a national aspiration the recovery of something which successive government policies have managed to exterminate almost completely is peculiarly damaging both in itself ...”

“... counter-revolution, and instead approached liberal modernity by a detour, progressing quietly and more efficiently under the aegis of its otherwise irrational traditions and precedents. Variants of this national myth exert a grip far beyond the ranks of Eurosceptics: even among professional historians, the expression ‘English Enlightenment’ still offends ...”

“... of about two hundred and fifty words, though again there are days which take five or six times more than this to deal with. Was it all worth it? Though anxious not to give Mrs Castle the slightest encouragement to publish the diaries she is no doubt keeping as a Member of the European Parliament, I have to say that it was. For a total of some eight out of ...”

“... directed by techniques of quantification. The present title might lead one to expect essays more specifically on the ways in which historians think and operate, but in fact they all deal with historical, not with methodological topics. If we are to understand the mind and method of this historian, we need to extract them from what he has ...”

“... Cummins gives no information on his schooling. Camden, however, says: This Drake (to relate no more than what I have heart from himself) was born of mean Parentage in Devonshire, and had Francis Russel (afterwards Earl of Bedford) for his Godfather, who, according to Custome, gave him his christen name. Whilest he was yet a Child, his Father, imbracing the ...”

“... and I scribble each morning almost as if demented by years of fictional starvation. I feel like Thomas Mann when he spoke of the ‘passionate truancy’ of his political speeches and writings in opposition to Hitler: a truancy which aided rather than subtracted from his creative work. After eight years in rural Suffolk I was fed up with life as a ...”

“... ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one suffer death, or is it just life’s ultimate experience?) Howard’s memorial was held at the ...”

“... the gauche Uncle Tannous (a diminutive of Antonius/Anthony) on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 ...”

“... by that of their husband. It is hard to know whether the first or second Mrs Hardy had the more doleful time. Emma is more mysterious. Already 33 when she married Hardy in 1874, she was a mature woman with decided opinions and a strong sense of self-esteem committing herself to a shy but ambitious ...”

“... preoccupation with the traditionally masculine concerns of national politics. They will await the more eagerly his forthcoming study of Lucy Hutchinson, who, not content with protecting her regicide husband from the scaffold, wrote her own Creation epic. The case for the republican conscience resounds most eloquently in the impressive coda to this book, in ...”

“... aristocrats in stately halls. His last public appearance is in January 1928 as a pall-bearer at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey along with the Prime Minister, Kipling, Shaw, Housman, Barrie, Galsworthy, and the Masters of the Queen’s College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge – all of whom (with the exception of the dons) I recall as ...”