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“... realism’; but her realism is seldom deep enough to warrant its self-consciousness. Margaret Drabble appears to want to combine Dickens and Woolf, to combine caricature and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most ...”

“... earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him.’ It gave a key to ...”

“... ministers would never dare tamper with the diplomatic correspondence of foreign princes, as ‘the king’s sister, I may claim as much or more respect from them’. When Charles continued to follow his father’s preference for diplomatic negotiations over military deployments, Elizabeth relayed to the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, that she had ...”

“... expertise around child health and development. Feeding and Care of Baby (1913) by Frederic Truby King, a New Zealand-born doctor, was reprinted several times in Britain after he visited the country in 1917. He worried about the ‘injudicious handling’ of the ‘babies of the Empire’; good habits, he said, came from the strict allowance of mother’s ...”

“... got the hang of Twitter, and now he feels that he was negligent in not doing so. He notes that Margaret Thatcher did all right without it – indeed, ‘the very idea that she could have contained her thoughts to 140 characters is preposterous. The Lady was not for tweeting. But I should have been.’ Really? Not only is the thought of Brown tweeting his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Martin Loughlin arguably gets it in one: ‘By establishing the principle that acts of the king had an official character exercisable through certain forms, the charter constituted a landmark in the emergence of English governing arrangements.’ What followed was, as he says, messy. It took a long time for king and ...”

“... Traditionally, the patriarch as a literary character is not let off so lightly. Beside Job, King Lear and the Vicar of Wakefield, Harry Caldecote most certainly has nothing to complain of. The biggest threat to his peace of mind comes, one would guess, from the precocious minicab driver who warns him that the whole ‘drinking culture’ is destined to ...”

“... albeit strong Unionists both – have been willing to go as far as Law took his party: telling the King’s Private Secretary, in January 1914, that if the Liberal Government failed to call an election on the Home Rule Bill, they must ‘prepare for the consequences of civil war’? It was this letter, Asquith told Redmond a week later, that had convinced the ...”

“... Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the legend, Candaules dies for thinking his ...”

“... part in Harold’s sensorium, as does the noble house of Marks and Spencer. For a while all is King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. But the Beggar Maid, in this instance, is sharp-witted enough to become uneasy when confronted with the full blast of Harold’s adoration. What she does not know is that a specific kind of loss has consumed Harold’s past and ...”

“... Graham Greene, who fed her on oysters and smoked salmon, and took her to see Charlie’s Aunt and King Lear. When the film star Maureen Swanson wanted 18th-century Chinese wallpaper in her dining-room, but found she couldn’t afford it, Jocelyn Rickards was commissioned to create an oriental effect with her brushes. After two days of painting lotus lilies ...”

“... him. The Victorians, who lapped up his history of religion and a hagiography of his ‘seraphic’ Margaret Blagge, burnished his pious image. But Sylva shows us quite a different Evelyn, a man who was driven by curiosity, ‘living for ingenuity’ and could even make a roomful of naval officials ‘die almost with laughing’. Luckily, Pepys was there, at ...”

“... Party is never happier than when Labour has a unilateral disarmer as its leader. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher arrived at her party’s annual conference in Bournemouth with a spring in her step, despite having endured months of bruising political infighting in the aftermath of the Westland affair. She promptly fell over a manhole cover and sprained her ...”

“... to attempt the virtually impossible task of getting to the right of New Labour was anyway futile. Margaret Thatcher said, not in her ‘Mummy returns’ speech at Plymouth during the election campaign but shortly before her fall in 1990: ‘Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!’ That showed not only ...”