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“... often through quatrain-by-quatrain explication. Now, a vigorous, wry, alert new translation by Richard Sieburth offers English readers the experience of reading them steadily and sequentially, rather than piecemeal, and with the original French on facing pages, making it possible to read the prophecies as acts of writing rather than riddles. Nostradamus ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... These palaces were essentially status symbols. Italy was becoming a land of façades. Professor Richard Trexler, another old Florentine hand, is interested in another kind of façade. His long-awaited book is a study of ritual and formal behaviour in Florence from the 14th century to the end of the last Republic in 1530. Historical studies of ritual have ...”

“... Who can forget the moment in Chapter Six of Greenmantle when Richard Hannay penetrates the inner apartments of Colonel Ulric von Stumm and, with a thrill of horror, realises that there is something distinctly rum about the chief of Prussian Intelligence: Everywhere on little tables and in cabinets was a profusion of knick-knacks, and there was some beautiful embroidery framed on screens ...”

“... The ‘tragedy’ of Arminianism was that in the 1620s, under the leadership first of Richard Neile and then more decisively of William Laud, it was annexed to Charles I’s programme of political ‘absolutism’. Trevor-Roper does not describe the precise content of that programme. If it existed, then the constitutional objectives of the Puritan ...”

“... spirit left to be broken. All this we should have known long ago. Think of the career of the great Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted ...”

“... by Cromwell’s attainment of quasi-monarchical power; a third marked by the overthrow of Richard as Lord Protector and the brief re-establishment of the Rump; and the fourth, to be termed the ‘glorious revolution’ by Bevil Higgons in 1726, the restoration of Charles II. Hill, however, is using the term in a more modern sense: for a vast and ...”

“... Both these books sport impressive supporting casts, which run into the glittering hundreds. Sir Richard Attenborough is the common factor. Bergen was his co-star in a film called The Sand Pebbles, shot on location in the Far East. Out of hours, while the other actors, Steve McQueen amongst them, were busy getting drunk and chasing women, Dickie (bless ...”

“... more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.But with the reign of King Bluebeard, you don’t have to pretend. Women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their animal nature, are central to the story. The history of the reign is so graphically gynaecological that in the past it enabled lady novelists to write about sex ...”

“... were to be like-minded successors to Augie, including the loud-mouthed hero of Henderson the Rain King (‘I want, I want,’ he repeats, far too many times), the self-destructive poet of Humboldt’s Gift, and most recently the luxurious, overweening and powerfully connected Ravelstein, the hero of Bellow’s latest novel, ‘doomed to die because of his ...”

“... had, after all, reached its climax in Wales. In the summer of 1399, the shattering deposition of Richard II, the ultimate de jure monarch of the old medieval order, removed the last king of Britain who ruled by undisputed hereditary right. Enough princely blood ran in Glyn Dŵr’s veins to lend a certain legitimacy to his ...”

“... Liberal deputy first elected in 1919, failed to oppose the confidence vote on the new government. King Victor Emmanuel III had capitulated to the fascists, but Amendola had faith in Italy’s constitution and the strength of its democratic institutions. Like many other members of the liberal coalition that fell when Mussolini took power, Amendola hadn’t ...”

“... vengefulness, the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types ...”

“... people like Edward Bellamy, Henry George, H.G. Wells, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King. These are the people who dangle carrots before democratic societies by suggesting concrete ways in which things might get better – become more democratic, fairer, more open, more egalitarian, more decent. They supply local hope, not universal ...”

“... advise, when his time comes, that might undermine the process of The Hague? Quite a lot about the king-makers with their easygoing hands-across-the-sea approach to his ascendancy, and quite a lot about the time-servers – quite a lot, if he wants to air it, on Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, David Owen. On the UN, which ...”