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“... of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years ...”

“... more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an antiquated system of common law and rationalised a diffuse system of mercantile law; he drafted statutes; he played a central role in politics as cabinet member, counsellor and confidant; he knew everyone from Boswell ...”

“... up support for Palatine restitution and raise funds in London. In 1634, Elizabeth’s agent, Sir Francis Nethersole, was arrested after failing to obtain sanctuary at the Dutch ambassador’s house in London. Outraged by the seizure of her private papers, Elizabeth fumed at the implied suspicion that ‘I have any evil plots against my ...”

“... left on the island of Roanoke to establish some kind of encampment. They hitched a lift home with Francis Drake after deciding that supply ships were not going to arrive. Further settlers went out to Virginia in 1587 on the promise of five hundred acres each, and were again left to fend for themselves while English shipping was preoccupied with fighting off ...”

“... Fleet was preparing to repel further surface raids on convoys. Admiral Tovey, in the battleship King George V, had with him a carrier, Victorious, with a team of untried pilots, and a new battleship, Prince of Wales, which still carried civilians, who were trying to sort out its slightly wonky guns, and finally the battle-cruiser Hood, the darling of the ...”

“... the Muslim armies profited from the unpopul-arity of the ruling Visigoths. In July, Tarik defeated King Roderic, and the local population flocked to join the army that had rid them of an oppressive ruler. By the autumn, Córdoba and Toledo had both fallen. As it became clear that Tarik was determined to take the whole peninsula, an envious Musa bin Nusayr left ...”

“... not only because of the faith of the ‘gaunt and ghastly’ Earl, but because Edie Ochiltree, the King’s beadsman, an itinerant sage of proud bearing and wild white hair who encounters the Earl in his private chamber, might also have been a fit subject for Ribera’s brush. What Scott and his readers would have thought of as a typical painting by Velázquez ...”

“... of the Lambs; his obsession with angels (he has an enormous one tattooed on his back) recalls Francis Dolarhyde’s sub-Blakean mysticism; and the shaving-off of all his body hair seems very much the sort of thing that one of Harris’s sexually-disoriented psychopaths would do. Above all, there is the emphasis on ...”

“... social comedy. On the other side of the Atlantic, a mythic hero like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King also bears the political weight of his nation’s encounters with the Third World. In the milder Canadian setting, Davies can place a domesticated myth more comfortably at centre stage, less overshadowed by any rival powers. Murther and Walking ...”

“... Giles Foden and Ann Harries have produced new examples of the genre. In his first novel, The Last King of Scotland, Foden brilliantly re-created the Uganda of General Amin, portrayed with increasing horror through the eyes of a naive young Scottish doctor. He evidently remembers Uganda very well (as I can vouch, having lived there a little earlier) and, in ...”

“... not with Ignatius, where visual description has nothing much to contribute, but with the glamorous Francis Xavier, or rather with his allegedly incorrupt body arriving back in Goa a year or so after his death in sight of China in 1552. Alive, he ‘stands on the waterfront bare-footed, black-cassocked and haloed, behind him a calm sea, busy with ships trimming ...”

“... Frye to sue the other members. When they protested through the Lords of the Admiralty to the King, the Chief Justice had the whole lot of them arrested for contempt and released them, when they apologised, with the warning: ‘Whosoever set themselves up in opposition to the law or think themselves above the law will find themselves mistaken.’ Why ...”

“... cities of the world London has ... for centuries had a uniquely ascendant position,’ asseverates Francis Sheppard. From their respective standpoints of two millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy ...”

“... 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead ...”

“... across the European stage, trailing clouds of martial glory. But whereas Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France inherited the kingdoms they had been born in, Charles knew next to nothing about his new dominions. Arriving in Spain for the first time in 1517 to take up the crowns of Castile and Aragon, the teenage ...”