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“... his life. In his late fifties now, he writes, as though the thought were new to him: ‘It is the mark of a true love that one thinks of what the other suffers. For he suffers too, is also a poor devil.’ What alarms here is the very banality of the thought, and indeed one looks in vain for any similar sentiment in his earlier romantic ...”

“... was eaten, the sister who was also a victim, however complicit, in the hellish household, leave no mark. There might conceivably be an element of tact in these omissions, but nothing is more suspect than the tact of an autobiographical poet. All tact has been overthrown as a precondition of the mode, and any attempt to reinstate it seems surreptitious and ...”

“... power. So it could be the way to get on, while stimulating exemption from worldly ambition. It was Francis Bacon who would, in Shapin’s words, make ‘a joint case for the reform of learning and the expansion of state power’. It was a question of how to keep curiosity and ambition – greed, as we might psychoanalytically say – on the side of ...”

“... rock – or, as Saul Steinberg has it in the old cartoon, pushing a huge, boulder-like question-mark – up a hill. The poems that elicited most controversy were the cycles ‘Landscapes’ and ‘List’. Here’s ‘On the Table’, a poem from the former: The tablecloth stretches Into infinity The ghostly Shadow of a toothpick follows The bloody trail ...”

“... while the chauffeur falls to his knees and makes the sign of the cross. The British Ambassador, Francis Osborne, tried in vain to draw Pacelli’s attention to the plight of the Jews and other civilian populations of Occupied Europe, but Pacelli refused to make any moral distinctions between the belligerents, preferring instead to preach on the proprieties ...”

“... with progress to a more equal society. New Labour is often derided on the Left as an ‘SDP Mark 2’. But as the pair acknowledge, the original SDP was incorrigibly Old Labour by Blairite standards. They have more time for David Owen’s later ‘tough love’ posture, though preferring what they call a ‘rounded’ blend of social market and ...”

“... of Russia and France for Protestantism to have any impact. Cardinal Newman’s eccentric brother Francis – classicist, anti-vaxxer and pioneer vegetarian – was one of the many young idealists who failed to make a single convert in Syria. He returned home gloomily prophesying that ‘all the Christians of Turkey will become Romanist.’ But though the ...”

“... of Republican liberty and thundering critic of autocracy. He was finally hunted down by lackeys of Mark Antony, a member of Rome’s ruling junta and principal victim of Cicero’s dazzling swansong of invective: more than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes’ almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries ...”

“... something of a high-wire act, risking bathos on the one side, forced extravaganza on the other. Francis Wyndham was not alone in feeling a certain weary exasperation, commenting of one of her books that ‘there must be less to life than this.’ Like her own Fevvers, however, Carter saw herself as committed to a death-defying act as a storyteller in ...”

“... put the figure of those who get help from the government at 96 per cent. So, in the words of Mark McKinnon, a former political adviser to George W. Bush, ‘Romney’s comment managed to offend just about everyone in America.’ No it didn’t. The 96 per cent don’t think in one mind about anything. Many of the 47 per cent will self-identify with the ...”

“... Spanish. The conceit of Facing East from Indian Country that we are looking west to east, at what Francis Jennings entitled The Invasion of America, is the weakest part of what is in many ways a very good book. Stripped of its pretences, this is much less an account of how Indians would have viewed the colonial experience than a synthesis of thirty years of ...”

“... favourite then joined up with two courtiers, Endymion Porter (who had been born in Spain) and Sir Francis Cottington, and set sail for France on 19 February. They were thoroughly sick on the voyage. The small party was conspicuous enough to be identified by a group of German tourists outside Paris, so they took the precaution of buying periwigs to thicken ...”

“... on the period. And, Ives tells us, forget about all the allegations of adultery, with Norris, with Francis Weston, with Anne’s own brother Rochford, with William Brereton, the ultimate fall-guy from Cheshire whose story first drew Ives into a study of the Henrician court, with poor Mark Smeton the musician, the only one to ...”

“... University Press and later as an English lecturer at the university itself, Williams made his mark through those he published, those he encouraged and, above all, those he impressed. He struck people as amazing. His energy was famous, his conversation a flood. At OUP, he would march into the office, bound up the stairs and immediately write down the ...”

“... Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 years after it was put up, the Russian Ministry of Culture dismantled and completely refurbished ...”