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“... which form the subject of this book. Rather than provide a narrative account of the fighting, Charles Carlton tries to convey the flavour of the wars as combatants and non-combatants experienced them. He follows current fashion by treating the fighting in England, Ireland and Scotland as part of a single struggle, and shows that in all three kingdoms ...”

“... Deedes, the illustrious former editor of the Telegraph, was celebrating his 90th birthday at the Carlton Club. I had got to know him a few years earlier, on a Unicef trip to Sudan, and we ended up spending time together, first in Kenya. He was ever the eager young journalist, showing up all chatty at the grass huts in Lokichogio and asking for the ...”

“... there is Laudianism, the new-fangled High Churchmanship which was awarded political ascendancy by Charles I. Then, opposed to it, there is the old-fashioned Calvinism of that doyen of Puritan scholars, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Although the first system was less dogmatic than the second, both of them closed their adherents’ minds. Between them ...”

“... these studies I changed my mind about ‘the Puritan Revolution’. In an important new book, Charles I and the Popish Plot, Caroline Hibbard has tackled the origins of the Civil War by documenting the Catholic intrigue at the Court of Charles I from the late 1630s to the outbreak of Civil War. Her findings complement ...”

“... from them. London’s wealthy had been moving west since the 17th century and McWilliam fixes on Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 as the moment when the economy took off again after the uncertainties and destruction caused by the Civil Wars. The plague saw only a temporary retreat, and the population of London quadrupled between 1550 and 1700. It was ...”

“... melancholia and regret might indeed be more seemly for the old state-nation. Yet, as the famous Carlton TV programme on the Monarchy earlier this year showed, there is no chance of that: the wake naturally takes the form of a raucous, invigorating, escalating, would-be democratic row – itself entirely at odds with the spiritual ethos of yesteryear. The ...”

“... a better choice this time’. In a long dissertation the Daily Telegraph, whose editor was then Charles Moore, told its readers that Duncan Smith saw things with ‘the eyes of a voter’ and had a better ‘estimation of the huge scale of the Tory task’ than Clarke did. Moreover, he had ‘a more thoughtful analysis of what has gone wrong’ and was ...”

“... came to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand in 1928. He boxed, rowed and through the Carlton Club became a protégé of Nancy Astor. Their friendship continued, with some alarming contact with a blood-and-nation group called the English Mistery and the offer by an emissary of the Duke of Devonshire of the safe Tory seat of Eastbourne, until the ...”

“... an event about which his circle was nervous. ‘Moran’ is a reference to his personal physician, Charles Moran, and Soames primly advises us: ‘A “Moran” was the name given by WSC to a special stimulant pill prescribed by Lord Moran for him to take before a major speech.’ Special stimulant pill? Soames offers no clue as to its chemical ...”

“... reaching its apogee in those early 19th-century extravaganzas in Belgravia, Regent’s Park and Carlton House Terrace. It was also adopted by the highly emulative middle classes, who produced their own provincial versions in spas like Bath, Clifton, Cheltenham and Leamington, and in resorts like Brighton, Folkestone, Eastbourne and St Leonards. By the ...”

“... The proximate cause of the fall of the Coalition was the meeting of Conservative MPs at the Carlton Club. But the long-run explanation ran deeper. Like the monarchy in the days of Charles I, the regime foundered because the Court lost touch with the Country. The mechanics of this process are beautifully displayed, the ...”

“... the same was true in England? The answer was not long coming: six months, if we reckon it between Carlton’s televised debate in February and another poll conducted in August, shortly before Diana’s death, which showed the first modest anti-royal majority among the English. In April the royal family had looked like mouldering waxworks: in midsummer it ...”

“... but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade books of exemplary jokiness). Unreadability, McGann says, can be a virtue. The poems of Emily Dickinson, unpublished in her lifetime, test editorial practice. McGann’s ...”

“... In the centre of the room there are two skeletons. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, faces the front. His skeleton, tainted brown because of the speed and secrecy of its preparation, is seven feet ten inches tall. So towering are the bones, and so impossibly hefty is their accompanying leather boot, that it’s easy to walk past without noticing the adjacent filigree form ...”