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“... As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to transfer the money to Mr Shakespeare himself,’ she said. ‘No … Listen, I really need to speak to Mr Shakespeare. Can you put me through? Hello? … Hello?’ Then the line went dead ...”

“... from the four walls. Historians and biographers have never offered identical portraits of the king. For A.F. Pollard, writing a hundred years ago, Henry was a Land of Hope and Glory monarch, who by some divine intuition foresaw his country’s destiny and laid its foundations. ‘It was the king, and the ...”

“... and has Thomas More executed. At the end of the book, in the late summer of 1535, Cromwell, the king and his attendants stop off at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, the home of the blandly charming Jane Seymour and her family. This is where Bring Up the Bodies begins. Its title may sound a bit Hammer Horror, but it comes from the phrase that was used when those ...”

“... not being a person, could not be a fit person of full age. One of the judges, Sir James Fitz-james Stephen, applied the same reasoning that had been used in relation to the franchise: because women had never been able to hold public office, clearer language than this would be needed to change things. (It was the same judge who not long afterwards and without a ...”

“... shells, cups like butterflies – seemed to me the finest in the world. I could not imagine the king and queen having better. Against this rich tapestry, Gee maps out a relationship (and conflict) between cousins which has the same emblematic significance as Sillitoe’s drama of art and action. Duggie Plumb is the cousin who means to rise in the ...”

“... Stephen Greenblatt has moved on, or back, and not only from Berkeley to Harvard. He ended Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) with an account of Othello similar in shape to his present account of Hamlet, but pretty unconvincing; Hamlet in Purgatory hits the nail resonantly on the head. As is the way with new historicist interpretation, both expositions proceed by relating a crux in the play to a prominent item in the surrounding or preceding non-literary culture; in these cases, theological and religious culture ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”

“... unofficial and convenient way even if at first it is a little forced’. But the role of the Good King soon began to pall. At Oxford, he wrote to a friend: ‘I wish to God I’d been brought up in an intelligent, sane (but not too stiff and British) middle-class family with a close connection with some kind of work ...”

“... let alone even the most influential works of criticism. As the founding father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of ...”

“... to Sir Alfred Mond, the commissioner of works. It concluded with the singing of ‘God Save the King’ and the pious hope on Mond’s part that as ‘Our ancestors hero worshipped the sun when it rose … We today can turn our eyes towards the sun of victory won so gallantly by the men who have gone out and fought and died for us.’ Progress towards state ...”

“... the following from Reynolds’s ‘Thirteen Days in a Northern City’: Like most people, the King goes to the mountains to ski, normally driving, but when cars were banned during the Oil Crisis he took a tram for the first time. At the door, loaded with skis, he asked the conductor: ‘Do I have to pay?’ Admittedly, Reynolds avoids the worst ...”

“... lodges, and in the course of the century the rituals took permanent shape around the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, while the Masonic message crossed the Channel to France, probably borne there by Jacobite exiles. In Britain the middle and professional classes have provided the society’s main support ever since the period of consolidation. ...”

“... her definite superior in intelligence: the only one of Henry’s six wives whose marriage to the king was regularly called her ‘reign’ by contemporaries. That she had a mind of her own and was not afraid to use it is the most plausible explanation of her eventual downfall in 1536. Eric Ives’s biography of Anne, published in 2004, revealed her as a ...”

“... was it merely a reflection of the far more powerful and evil megawattage sweeping the Continent? Stephen Dorril’s intertwined biography of Mosley and British Fascism is exhaustive but easy-paced and entertaining, judicious – and damning. We shall not need another. He says pretty well everything that needs to be said, working his way carefully through all ...”

“... 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 ...”