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“... only in the 18th century. In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of ...”

“... have reformed from them, not against them,’ Browne observes, and deplores abuse of the pope); and in his fidelity to the institutional English Church. It appears also, Debora Shuger has pointed out, in his doctrinal minimalism, whereby no denomination should insist that they are the only true Christians: ‘those who doe confine the Church of ...”

“... for study; these models contained human body parts, and sometimes whole bodies were conserved. A pope had expressly given permission for such uses of the dead, in the interests of knowledge; yet in 18th-century England, Hogarth’s horrific scene of an autopsy (where a dog is lapping up the discarded innards), shows that to be used for science was ...”

“... Lithuania that ‘part of the western Russian Orthodox clergy submitted to the authority of the pope’. The gravitation of the unreformed Scottish Church to French Catholicism was equally unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be ...”

“... in western and southern France, and in Rome, where the radicals, after the flight of the pope on 24 November, eventually declared a republic. In the south of Germany, this second-wave upheaval was only extinguished in the summer of 1849, when Prussian troops captured the fortress of Rastatt in Baden, the last stronghold of the radical ...”

“... about turnips, potatoes and the intricacies of cheesemaking. The centrepiece of the second book of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad is a mock-epic games, featuring mud-slinging contests and competitions to see who can piss the highest. Satire could be profoundly unlikeable (as contemporary detractors and an army of hostile Victorian critics made clear), and ...”

“... his muse for Ireland now’! And an article should be written comparing Wilson with Tsar Alexander I at the Congress of Vienna. All this was very unrealistic, and illusions were quickly shattered. In the event, Ireland’s first representatives in Paris were Sean T. O’Kelly and George Gavan Duffy. O’Kelly, who had been a member of Dublin ...”

“... Starkey wrote further blueprints of reform, Pole withdrew to the Continent and conspired with the Pope and the Emperor against his king. In 1536-7, the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rebels looked to Pole to lead an invasion force to join them. The hope was dashed by Pole’s characteristic indecisiveness, and now seems improbable. Yet were the odds ...”

“... as ‘a bottle-imp containing miniature figurines dramatising a large bird’s attempt to strangle Alexander the Great with a golden thread, or a bas-relief of a girl extracting from a cushion the doll of a one-eyed dwarf dressed entirely in pink, or a skull engraved with Old Norse runes sporting a lady barrister’s cap made out of pages … from the ...”

“... writer’, and he cut some contributions by more than half. One enemy he certainly made was Alexander Balloch Grosart DD, who was invited to contribute several entries for the first volumes, principally on 17th-century divines. As early as October 1883, Stephen was complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool ...”

“... he does not name them. This is a pity, because as I’ve recently discovered, a source other than Alexander Selkirk’s narrative stirred Defoe’s imagination, and points to the crucial effect which the Battle of Sedgemoor (6 July 1685) had on Defoe and on what is effectively his coded spiritual autobiography, Robinson Crusoe. In a book called The Western ...”