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“... creditably, but Mitchell’s treatment of the West Indian background is blurred, and he even calls Thomas Clarkson ‘the American abolitionist’. Again, his discussion of Holland’s for once quite important role in the short-lived Canning Ministry is marred by his assertion, which is made not once but three times, that Lord Liverpool died in 1827. There are ...”

“... issues which carried popular feeling and those that really mattered. As an instance of this, William Thomas holds – rightly, I think – that the Municipal Corporation Reform of 1835 was really more important than Parliamentary Reform. He expects his readers to understand the interactions of the two elcctoral systems. He shows, in detail, how well ...”

“... period. In his fascinating new book, Professor Duby stresses that his subject, the knight-errant William Marshal, was never alone: ‘Who is ever alone at the beginning of the 13th century but the mad, the possessed – marginal figures who are hunted down? An orderly world requires that each man remain swathed in a fabric of solidarities, of friendships, in ...”

“... who had ruined everything, the bane of virtuous Queen Katherine, virtually the murderer of saintly Thomas More. For Protestants, she was, formally at least, the rootstock of their Reformation, and to be honoured as such. But mud sticks, and, after all, it was not the likes of Thomas More but the sacred monarch himself who ...”

“... at his country’s methods was so great that he broke off relations with former friends (like Thomas Mann) and even his current lover, who championed the sinking. Others were moved to fisticuffs. The social-critical novelist Leonhard Frank overheard a socialist journalist proclaim in a posh Berlin café that the destruction of the Lusitania was ‘the ...”

“... achievements were those of others, and above all the towering achievement of his minister Thomas Cromwell, whose idea it was to declare UDI on the pope, and, in effect, the rest of Europe. Not all of those who came next, including his own pupils, agreed with Elton. Some very publicly disagreed, and Cromwell was in danger of being sealed back into the ...”

“... sure he was done for), and restored to life by the intervention of a saint. The Welshman was William Cragh (cragh in Welsh means ‘the scabby’), a follower, it appears, of the Welsh patriot Rhys ap Maredudd. Cragh had been captured by the men of William de Briouze, Lord of Gower, and sentenced by him to hang as a ...”

“... This will all seem familiar to aficionados of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: in the following reign, Thomas Cromwell was the apotheosis (or nadir) of these ‘new men’. As Steven Gunn argues in his new book, a work of characteristic meticulousness, not only did these men encapsulate the mood, workings and functioning of Henry VII’s disorientating ...”

“... R. George Thomas is a cautious man. His life of Edward Thomas (no relation) is ‘a portrait’ not ‘a biography’. Maybe this is just as well. The poet was a cautious man too. He was also a scrupulous one, and when we read in the first few pages that research for this book began ‘in the early 1960s’, we are encouraged to feel that author and subject are kindred spirits ...”

“... The Passing of Barchester examines in fine focus the case of a 19th-century Dean of Canterbury, William Rowe Lyall, himself childless, who found Church appointments for his younger brother, four nephews and three nephews-in-law. If there was any ‘senseless outcry’ against Dean Lyall on grounds of favouritism the author does not mention it: though there ...”

“... in whose head an infinity of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; ...”

“... 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco ...”

“... and critics to forgive him, by forgetting how in the 1930s and 1940s, under the influence of Dylan Thomas, he was an eager perpetrator of New Romanticism. Watkins was at Repton and Cambridge with Christopher Isherwood, and makes a cameo appearance as the gullible Percival in Lions and Shadows. Nevertheless, he had little in common with the Auden generation or ...”

“... The tale of the apostle Thomas is a sea unspeakably vast.’ Thus the Syriac poet Jacob of Sarugh, who lived in upper Mesopotamia in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. The words are stirring but to our ears perhaps surprising, because in the West we think we know Thomas’s ‘tale’ and its significance pretty well ...”

“... together the details of Mendonça’s campaign, Nafafé shows that abolitionism began not with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, but with a transnational African movement a century earlier. In order to make this case, he has to reconstruct the complex and intertwined worlds of Angola, Brazil and Southern Europe in ...”