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“... made the most of his circumstances (which were rarely quite as grand as he made out). When he once drew up a list of seven distractions that had prevented him from accomplishing more work, ‘money (business)’ was in seventh place, just below ‘travel’ in sixth. In ascending order, ‘politics (public career)’ came next (he had briefly been state ...”

“... recall reading about this in Catholic Girlhood – how Mary’s father, already doomed, drew a revolver on the conductor who wanted to put them off). Here she makes nothing of this beginning and asks for no sympathy: perhaps such a trauma goes into life rather than print. At least money and books and a place in Seattle society were no ...”

“... sectarian warfare. History exemplified the moral. Henry VIII dismantled the ancient religion and Elizabeth I prudently reached a via media which avoided the ferocious religious wars of France and Scotland. James I foolishly drew religion back into statecraft and Charles I so intensified the problem that a civil war of ...”

“... fattest of the writers so that he looks slender rather than short. Of the sketches that Pushkin drew in the margins of his manuscripts, most harrowing are those of the hanged Decembrists, mostly his friends. By name at least the Decembrists are probably better known in Britain than Pushkin himself. They were failed revolutionaries, always popular. Hanged ...”

“... placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of calls and with ...”

“... prose is alive with doubts, speculations, lapses in memory. It is a breathing, flawed thing. In Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928), Lytton Strachey collapsed this passage into an unforgettable final vignette of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow’. Strachey, serenely ...”

“... leisure in which to pursue them, thanks to a family fortune founded on manufacturing gunpowder for Elizabeth I. He had spent most of the Civil War period and its aftermath touring France, Italy and the Netherlands, where he acquired an excellent knowledge of European art and architecture; and much of his later life was devoted to introducing Continental high ...”

“... paintbrush-thick eyelashes. These, though, were a very dark brown. (‘They’re like those of Elizabeth Taylor,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe Montgomery Clift.’) His eyes, too, were very dark – but a very dark green. He was, moreover, articulate – speaking in full, proper sentences and using no, like, you know, ‘discourse markers’. Although born and ...”

“... of the Whig orators arrayed against Hastings, and ‘the whirlwind of his eloquence nearly drew me into its vortex.’ Nearly, but not quite. When Burke approached her, expecting her to praise him, she asked him to justify some of the wayward phrases in his speech, such as ‘Geographical morality’. Burke responded ‘with an air so full of ...”

“... as the refuge of ‘many a psychological misfit and lonely crank’ – despite the fact that Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill were both inducted as druids.Stone Circles takes a balanced approach, appreciating Stukeley’s contribution to the scientific as well as the mythic. Having trained as a doctor, he transferred his skills from anatomy to field ...”

“... man and is frustrated by physiological difference. The magisterial Jonson, in his play Poetaster, drew the moral conclusion: if that is what Ovid is really like, then Ovid must go, and Virgil, the poet of piety, honour, order and the idea of Rome, must come forward in his place. This severe placing of the two poets held firmly and perhaps still holds. When I ...”

“... cathedral organs were being demolished and the choirs set to singing metrical psalms, but when Elizabeth ascended the throne, she ignored that trajectory, and her own Chapel Royal set a standard of musical elaboration and beauty that the Church of England has never forgotten. Westminster Abbey, across the road from the Palace of Whitehall, was frequently ...”

“... wife, whose name has never been recorded, had died, leaving him four children. His second wife, Elizabeth, courageous and pious like his first, presented a petition to secure his release. Angered by the callous attitude of one of the Justices of the Peace, and by the mockery of several bystanders, she denounced the proceedings: ‘Because he is a ...”

“... was burned in effigy while tea and cakes were served. Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and the young Elizabeth Barrett were among those who felt that as women they must support the queen. That a woman, a wife and a mother could be subjected to such public humiliation seemed to undermine both ancient ideas of chivalry and modern ones of emancipation. There were ...”

“... rank. But the laws were always shifting. In Leipzig, for example, where the annual trade fair drew visitors from all over the world and brought new looks from Paris and Florence and Turkey and India, there were strict regulations about ribbons and lace and silk, and who could wear an artificial braid in their hair or gold jewellery or ‘expensive belts ...”