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“... fascinating pages). This is clear enough from Davenport-Hines’s inclusion among his Goths of Alexander Pope, the Earl of Shaftesbury and the architect William Kent. The dominant culture of 18th-century England was not averse to a spot of wild irregularity, not least when it came to gardening. Or indeed to the heroic couplet, which combines symmetry ...”

“... after Marriage, a farce written by John Gay, with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be seducers have moved into his domestic ...”

“... in Livonia. The Knights ‘yearned for battle like a hungry falcon’, intoned ‘the sword is our Pope’ and thought nothing of massacring the entire population of any town imprudent enough to cavil at the Gospel message. Kóscól, Polish for ‘church’, comes from the word for ‘castle’. Those are the extremities. Points between them are almost ...”

“... as cabinet member, counsellor and confidant; he knew everyone from Boswell to Blackstone and Pope to Pitt; and at Kenwood in Hampstead he constructed a mansion, designed by Robert Adam, and a park which remain a high point of British design. Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John ...”

“... you may even be glad of a wheelchair yourself.’ Until then, I had gloried in what the crippled Alexander Pope bitterly, and brilliantly, categorised as ‘all the arrogance of superfluous health’. For the next thirty years, there was not a day when I could not get up and do a day’s work. But Quentin made me grateful for every one of them, never ...”

“... borrow music from the Muse of Gray’), his Grayness keeps veering off uneasily into the tones of Alexander Pope (‘And I – a victim to love’s cruel dart,/Went – to the Opera – with a broken heart!’) – in this case, the satirical invasion saves the poem from drowning in its own reserves of treacle. As soon as the lad wakes up we are shown ...”

“... Ladies Heads, &c. &c”’. In stories like these Pilkington is playing a serious game, not unlike Pope’s in his feminisation of epic in the beautifully violent world of The Rape of the Lock: she is reversing the gender of the ‘scandalous memoir’ by exposing the male secrets to which her own oppression gave her access. The role Pilkington fought against ...”

“... not officially (it’s worth remembering that Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia were the children of Pope Alexander VI). By way of an example: Arthur Balfour was made Chief Secretary of Ireland when his mother’s brother, the Marquess of Salisbury, or ‘Robert’ to his friends, was Prime Minister – hence ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ Here’s a ...”

“... Papal banker Agostino Chigi also colours this book. Chigi is another hero of hers. So, too, is Pope Julius II. Rowland is expert at placing the subjects she studies in relation to each other. A jocular study of the ruins of Rome by ‘Prospettico Melanese depictore’ (‘the Perspectivist’ – or, as she whimsically has it, ‘Mr ...”

“... and its reprints (1632, 1663-64, 1685), followed by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 plays which had ...”

“... 1714 for debasing government and oppressing the masses. Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke and Alexander Pope argued this at the time, and Benjamin Disraeli made the same point when he stigmatised the Venetian oligarchy. Yet labelling the Whigs as the bad guys in this fashion, and indeed discussing 18th-century England in terms of internal violence in ...”

“... an affinity for Enlightenment rhetoric and a modern feminist irony: like Edith Sitwell reading Alexander Pope. But her early books also owe a debt to Virgil. He wrote his Eclogues and Georgics before attempting his epic; Robertson began her cursus with XEclogue (1993), a book of pastoral featuring the ‘roaring boys’, Lady Mary Wortley ...”

“... with a number of the age’s luminaries, from the Duchess of Marlborough to Richard Steele and Alexander Pope. At the age of 18, Cleland arrived in Bombay in the service of the East India Company, where his skill at writing and talent for languages smoothed his progress from foot soldier to attorney, and from there to secretary of the Bombay ...”

“... The proverbial fertility of rabbits is further demonstrated by the story’s prodigious afterlife. Alexander Pope, who co-wrote a smutty poetic squib about Toft, proceeded in The Dunciad (1728-43) to create the Goddess of Dulness, a ‘Mighty Mother’ whose numerous botched offspring themselves go on to generate monstrous children of their diseased ...”

“... Spain was in doubt about its new dominion in the Antilles. In 1493, the Pope Alexander VI had granted Ferdinand and Isabel the right to conquer and also to enslave the inhabitants of the islands. But only two years later, Isabel was intervening to stop the sale of some that Columbus had sent back to Seville. It was not that she or anyone else objected to slavery itself ...”