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“... the maskers seem to improvise witty or pathetic dialogue, according to an agreed storyline. D.M. Thomas remarks that he is indebted to Germaine Greer for supplying him with information about the tradition of the improvisatrici in Italy: he has constructed Swallow (‘the second,’ he says, ‘in a series of improvisational novels’) in the form of a story ...”

“... more rapturous the explanation offered. Barnett Newman painted a vertical stripe on a canvas, and Thomas Hess saw it as a version of divine creation – ‘as God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void’. (The metaphor does not even correspond to the painting, since Newman’s line divides one darkness from another.) Coleridge wrote in ...”

“... Boies were fooles.’ Marlowe seems to have died in a manner appropriate to the writer of Edward II and Dr Faustus. His perceived personal style appeals much more obviously than Shakespeare’s to an Anglo-American academy invested in the idea that Renaissance poets ought above all to have been subversive, and he is enjoying more scholarly attention ...”

“... liberties himself, Powell chose to betray his own party and plot with Harold Wilson to defeat Edward Heath. I visited Pentonville Prison in December, on a tour to mark the jail’s 175th anniversary. No phones, no laptops – instant isolation and unease. Pentonville was considered a model new prison when it was built in the 1840s – the idea that each ...”

“... her husband, their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her ...”

“... beyond what would become Russell Square. It survives as a tomb-laden garden tucked behind the Thomas Coram Foundation Museum.The exhibition encourages you to find modern parallels to things which are, at first sight, of their time. Last month’s papers showed the lucky few holding up numbered tickets to the public gallery at the Hutton Inquiry. Two ...”

“... traders’ India. White men happily took up hookahs, flowing dresses and local lovers. His father, Thomas Brooke, a prosperous High Court judge in the service of the East India Company, had a local mistress and an illegitimate child, for whom he provided in his will, and Mrs Brooke was herself almost certainly illegitimate and may have been Eurasian. ...”

“... to their English employers was forever in doubt. Few early diplomats – with exceptions such as Thomas Glover, the son of an English father and a Polish mother, a polyglot raised in Constantinople – were comfortable in this new Babel. Harborne’s successors all had their own difficulties. Edward Barton found himself ...”

“... carried on. But listen to this: Upon Sunday the 18th and 25th days of this instant month of July, Thomas Odam with a white sheet upon his uppermost garment, and a white wand in his hand, shall come into the parish church at Charlton at the beginning of the forenoon service and stand forth in the middle space before the pulpit during the whole time of divine ...”

“... from the genteel sisters Anne and Julia Bast in order to administer the estate of their brother Thomas, who died intestate. The sisters’ grip on relevance in conversation, and indeed reality, is far from fierce, but a family and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called Stella, and the fourth ...”

“... An adequately supported project may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on ...”

“... 15 October. Shot in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire; became part of the collection of the Rev. Thomas Gisborne of Staffordshire, known for his 1797 book, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. Exhibited, along with a Baillon’s crake, at a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastlein 1828; drawn by the engraver ...”

“... was a conventionally ‘manly’ king. The charge that Richard was immature was made explicitly by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, in the sermon he preached on Richard’s deposition in 1399. There he contrasted the ‘boy’, Richard, with his supplanter, the ‘man’, Henry IV. He also elaborated on the childlike characteristics that rendered ...”

“... his cause and urged the queen to make him her attorney-general. When that office fell to his rival Edward Coke, he set his sights on the solicitor-generalship, but with an equal lack of success. Bacon had offended Elizabeth I by his opposition in Parliament to some of her financial demands and Essex was a tactless supplicant. In a well-intentioned but almost ...”

“... of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, had read that the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, antiquary, lover of mysteries, connoisseur of odds and ends, was kept in the museum of that same hospital. He failed to find it, or the museum, and it turned out that the skull had subsequently been buried with the rest of Browne’s body in the ...”