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“... at the Old Bailey produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ...”

“... The point Wittkower might have made about the Escorial, the point that one of his students, René Taylor, did make, was that it was an attempt to reconstruct that lost master-piece of architectural proportion, the Temple of Jerusalem, as seen by a Spanish Jesuit, J.B. Villalpando. Villalpando interpreted the book of Ezekiel as evidence that God had revealed ...”

“... years of Tory Government. (She didn’t think much of Wilson’s lot, especially that ‘ugly’ George Wigg, the one ‘with the ear of Harold Wilson’ who, in addition to being apparently genetically modified, she ‘always thought looked like a pervert’). She has a place in history, to be sure, but not one that’s likely to be welcome in her scholarly ...”

“... exposed even more clearly the fault lines of the commercial metropolis. Impostors ranged from George Psalmanazar, the counterfeit Formosan, to the ‘social monster’ Charles Price, ‘otherwise Bolingbroke, otherwise Johnson, otherwise Parks, otherwise Wigmore, otherwise Brank, otherwise Wilmott, otherwise Williams, otherwise Schutz, otherwise ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find ...”

“... months, whereupon Elizabeth’s grandson Georg Ludwig became Britain’s first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in 1714.Akkerman is well-placed to write a Life of Elizabeth Stuart, having produced two edited volumes of more than 1200 letters written by and to the queen between 1603 and 1642; a third volume covering the two decades until Elizabeth’s death in ...”

“... colonial enforcer, schoolteacher, down-and-out, grocer, infantryman, there would have been no George Orwell, writer. But much of what we know about Blair, we know from Orwell. And it’s not just a matter of what he did when and where. It’s a matter of why he did it at all. Orwell exists because Blair was the sort of person who thought little of ...”

“... and others had drawn attention to the Kincora scandal, this would be investigated by ... Sir George Terry, Chief Constable of Sussex, who had just had Wallace put away for manslaughter. Better still, the man appointed by Terry to take charge of the Kincora inquiry was Gordon Harrison, who had been in charge of Wallace’s prosecution. Unsurprisingly, no ...”

“... was held between MacDonald and J.R. Clynes, who, serving as a competent minister in the Lloyd George war coalition, had at that time been tipped by the Observer as a future Labour prime minister. MacDonald was elected chairman and leader, as the press at the time, and Robert Mackenzie much later, stressed. MacDonald had the charisma, he had the contacts ...”

“... On the verge of office in 1964, he appeared to more than one observer as a latter-day Lloyd George, a radical tribune sprung from provincial nonconformity to drive the nation before him with wit and moral exhortation. After leaving office for the last time, he was more widely compared to Stanley Baldwin, a national conciliator and broker of industrial ...”

“... in utopian and dystopian writing – a world apart, for good or ill, as in Aldous Huxley’s Pala, George Orwell’s Airstrip One, the vivisectionist paradise of H.G. Wells’s Dr Moreau, Margaret Cavendish’s polymorphous freakshow in The Blazing World, or William Golding’s reworking of R.M. Ballantyne’s coral island as Beelzebub’s atoll ...”

“... was irresistible, but a parliamentary motion to that effect was defeated. What to do next? Helen Taylor refused to allow men to join the council of the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Bodichon resigned from it, thinking that this attitude would delay victory by at least ten years.Her upbringing and wealth had released her from ...”

“... he wrote, and in the breast of every admirer. Invoking Milton’s Satan, or Napoleon, or George III (in a long and elaborate poem), Lowell does not so much identify with those persons as cause them to appear in a new light as Robert Lowell. Who else could they be? What else could the poets and poems taken over in Imitations be? It is significant that ...”

“... coherent analysis remains that of scholars who, in the tradition of the great French historian, George Lefebvre, saw it as a “bourgeois revolution”.’ This cheerfully sweeps aside the researches of a whole generation. Cobban, Forster, Taylor, Doyle and Chaussinand-Nogaret have laboured in vain. Magraw is not writing ...”

“... In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s ...”