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“... royal nobleman in her house. She thought Surrey’s father, the Duke of Norfolk, might become king if Henry VIII died without a male heir (‘if ought should come to the King but good, his father should stand for king’), and declared that above his bed were arms ‘very like the ...”

“... Among the regular components are a major villain to scale up the action. In Native Tongue it is Francis X. Kingsbury, aka Frankie King, mobster, property speculator and theme park owner; in Double Whammy a wonderfully sleazy television evangelist who has made a fortune from redneck religion coupled with competition ...”

“... to English religion and government. The intelligence agent William Herle wrote that Philip II, the king of Spain, hated English Protestants ‘with an immortal hatred never to be reconciled, esteeming them worse than either Turks, Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus Christ’. Richard Verstegen, a Catholic ...”

“... royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King could not be directly blamed for these upsets, those who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began ...”

“... St Paul as the humiliated son of a failed businessman (and as the inordinately proud descendant of Francis Scott Key, author of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’); the glorious salad days at Princeton University, which he left without a degree; the wartime courtship of Zelda Sayre, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama; the sudden fame – and the marriage to Zelda ...”

“... slaving expanded significantly during the 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new king, Charles II, and his brother, the future James II. In 1665, it was James’s eagerness to capture Dutch slave-trading forts on the West African coast that set off the second Anglo-Dutch war. In the last quarter of the century, English ships carried almost ...”

“... for Edmund’ (presumably a little allusion of Tartt’s: Bunny was Edmund Wilson’s nickname); Francis Abernathy is the wimp; and the twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, are the beauties. The members of the gang have no life outside their poses. There is nothing here unmotivated, no detail that is not telling (‘he carried an umbrella, a bizarre sight in ...”

“... English have their houses made of sticks and dirt but they fare commonly so well as the king.’ This was possibly a traveller’s tale swelled by English patriotism, but in good times it contained some truth, and that it could be uttered and believed in its day is itself significant. Dr Palliser shows that one reason for low taxation was ...”

“... level, Imperial energy and Imperial virtue could not so easily appear to be held in balance. Sir Francis Younghusband (1863-1942) was the man-on-the-spot’s man-on-the-spot. Remembered today, when he is remembered at all, as the officer in charge of the British invasion of Tibet in 1904, he was for twenty years a leading player in the esoteric and dangerous ...”

“... which many of her advisers favoured. ‘Her majesty deals so coldly in these causes,’ wrote Sir Francis Walsingham, who did not believe in the likelihood of peace in his time. In August 1578, frustrated in foreign policy, these Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled ...”

“... across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a ...”

“... see it,’ he wrote, ‘would think our Western Monks had hence borrowed their Ceremonies.’ Francis Xavier – whose source was an accommodating, illiterate, renegade Japanese wanted for murder, whom he met in Malacca in 1547 – initially believed that the Buddha was not an idol but, like Moses, had ordered the smashing of idols in the name of the One ...”

“... he expressed enthusiasm for British painting – for David Wilkie, Charles Robert Leslie and Francis Grant – and noted that the archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites (the ‘école sèche’) had not inhibited their response to life and sentiment: he cited the Order of Release by Millais as something beyond the power of ‘nos primitifs, nos ...”

“... but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means sure that the danger had passed. Parma, with a powerful army, was still there in the Spanish Netherlands, and with a change of wind the Armada might still come back and carry him over to Kent – a ...”

“... will be no occasions of it. The first two occasions offered dismal precedents. Mary I’s consort, King Philip of Spain, was dangerously powerful in his own right, and only Mary’s barrenness saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s ...”