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“... 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 ...”

“... and kill them. If the lion really beat the unicorn, then the Crown pressing on the head of the king of beasts alone would destroy him. Which it has done and is doing. It is here also that we find his profound critique of ‘cyclical’ cosmologies and their absurd pentagrams and gyres, which he replaces by a truly human version of ‘eternal ...”

“... sea – prompted, one poem suggests, by a baleful look shot by the poet from her pram – Florence Margaret Smith lived in her Palmers Green house; from her mid-twenties, nicknamed Stevie after the jockey Steve Donoghue, she lived there alone with her aunt, producing three novels and a torrent of poems and articles, and working as a secretary at Newnes and ...”

“... York’s good fairy – the one with the magic wand, or the dividing rod – was of course Margaret Thatcher. In a little bit of trickery quite dazzling in its confusions, York sets out to equate the Thatcher ‘peasant revolt’ – the revolt against high-table paternalism by a winsome band of ‘clever outsiders’ – with the rise of a certain ...”

“... mean passing up the particular social opportunity then on offer, and later, when Mr Ramus the King’s page invited him to St James’s, he noted: ‘Formerly I should have jumped at such an opening. I am now too far advanced. Yet I may go.’ It’s like Crusoe feeling he can’t use the ship-wrecked money but then deciding to keep it, accelerated to the ...”

“... their church windows, and cared not a fart for any orders of the Parliament not confirmed by the king. Images were not only objects of belief: they were visible symbols of the unity of communities, and an unsuccessful symbol of unity is a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the ...”

“... chivalry stands contempt. A pleasanter irony, also involving chivalry, arises in the story of Margaret Nicholson, a seamstress, who in 1786 approached George III with a written petition and, concealed beneath it, a knife. ‘The king was saved by his exceedingly fine manners,’ for as he took the petition he bowed ...”

“... translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An exceptional, incomparable novel’. Le Roi des Aulnes is the only novel to have won the Prix Goncourt by unanimous decision, but Les Météores has enjoyed less ...”

“... it may be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and allow the base contagious clouds to smother up her virtue and beauty from the world in order that her charms should shine out all the more ...”

“... governments have tried to subdue the Corporation. Mrs Thatcher’s man was said to have been Lord King, privatiser of British Airways, and a highly unsuitable choice that would have been. We have been spared Lord King, who has withdrawn, and rumour has had it that we may be given Lord Barnett instead, someone with no ...”

“... hero-worship in such a manner as to make him a new sort of hero. He also knew how to hate Margaret Thatcher and the royal family, and he sent them up with an intoxicating vaudevillian glee: So I broke into the palace, With a sponge and a rusty spanner. She said: ‘Eh I know you and you cannot sing.’ I said: ‘That’s nothing, you should hear me ...”

“... quite natural. There is no jolt, no place to pause and say this is no longer believable. Stephen King considers Jackson one of the great horror writers because she ‘never had to raise her voice’. There are no sudden twists in ‘The Lottery’. It appears to darken gradually, although in fact it does so at remarkable speed. Tessie’s reaction when her ...”

“... Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. Margaret Barr remembers: Alfred and I were in Paris in 1931, going around to the galleries. We went to the Pierre Colle Gallery in the Rue de la Boétie where there was a show of Dali’s. Dali came in poor and emaciated. He had no suit jacket and wore a ...”