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“... been selected by the barons because witenagemots had supposedly met there since King Alfred’s day – ‘Runny’ comes from the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing ...”

“... of Kon Fredericks and Ralph Cooper (the plumber Sir Peter tried so hard to sack) and we think of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck; we cast their boss as the Sheriff of Nottingham, frustrated by merry men. Sir Peter’s diary shows him trying to persuade softer members of the staff to join Nattke in order to outvote the happy band of brothers; another tactic was to ...”

“... attempt – betrayed by minor scratches around his stomach – to perform harakiri. Every day brings more news of such deaths ‘in apology’ to the nation’s war widows and bereaved families. What will Ono do? Ishiguro gives a delicate and wholly convincing account of the evasions, the self-justifications and the pride of a man willing to bend with ...”

“... adapted it for the stage and then worked on the screenplay (the film starred Kirk Douglas and Dany Robin). When Hayes returned to the US, he began a new life as a member of the American middle class. A hatchet job on Eugene Lyons, whose book The Red Decade criticised the infatuation of American intellectuals with Stalin in the 1930s, was the final sign of any ...”

“... then proposes that neurochemistry has shaped the course of human history right up to the present day: ‘What passes for progress in human civilisation,’ he writes, ‘is often nothing more than new developments in the art of changing body chemistry.’ What Smail provides is not another version of the crude evolutionary psychology that has become popular ...”

“... The rich and titled, then as now, lend themselves best to Diary treatment. The royalty of the day went out of their way to oblige the press, particularly George III’s sons, who between them, as the Duke of Wellington observed, insulted every gentleman in the country. Where modern tabloids found a topic in the Duchess of York’s bottom, cartoonists of ...”

“... Yeats, Eliot, Auden and George Barker. Then, on leaving school, he published a novel, Opening Day, and before long his work could be found in the small magazines of his time such as Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and his friend Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing in Zwemmer’s as a schoolboy, he had encountered Surrealism in its ...”

“... in a cinema behind the screen (a woman who was then a little girl remembers what was playing the day they delivered the box: The Road to Bali, Rear Window and Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion), taken to a major’s house, shifted to a colonel’s office. These movements are top secret, but wherever the body goes, candles and flowers ...”

“... Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem, thanks to a Roman census, on a day corresponding to 25 December, at the end of a year corresponding to 1 BC, that all those fireworks, a few weeks ago, were marking his 2000th birthday in a meaningful way, that his mother was a virgin, that he rode into Jerusalem on an ass? Well, I am afraid ...”

“... It was said that at Louis XV’s ‘perfumed court’ a different scent was required for every day of the week. It isn’t hard to see the appeal of perfume, especially in smellier times. You would need a lot of essential oils in your nostrils to smother the stink of body odour, sewage and animal waste on an 18th-century street. Perfumes – which were ...”

“... one US senator later accused him of forging a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a ...”

“... life’ is described as stretching out its ‘steam feeler to this point three or four times a day’ and quickly withdrawing, as if what it found there was ‘uncongenial’. Wessex was where Hardy could stage his feeling for cosmic conservatism; a late formulation appears in ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’, written in 1915, which pits the ...”

“... her name with a hyphen and sometimes doesn’t? Karl Miller loses patience: ‘Dear Hans, every day I find a large accumulation of letters of contention and complaint, addressed to me. Most of them are from you’; then, ‘My head is dizzy with your letters and cards of criticism and rebuke’; and, finally, ‘If you do not like our editorial policies and ...”

“... books Fen’s domesticity is erratically revived: ‘He went home and spent the remainder of the day eating, sleeping, reading, vilifying his children and practising desultorily on the French horn.’ Later in the same book, Frequent Hearses, Fen laments the arrival of the long vacation because there will be no demands on his time. The happily married ...”

“... scholarship and money, this particular millennium construction would not have seen the light of day for many years. Louis has not produced an encyclopedia. Anyone searching for information about events in specific countries, or on the origins of current crises, would be seriously disappointed. Only Ireland gets a decent showing over the centuries ...”