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“... with health anxieties are among the busiest people on earth. The young Boswell, travelling in Holland, was prey to all sorts of debilitating symptoms: ‘Oh dear! I am very ill.’ A friend advises keeping a journal and ‘debauching a Dutch girl’. The journal meant as a solution then becomes Boswell’s problem; he is compelled to try to record ...”

“... of muscovado were piled up in the warehouses, ready for the city’s refineries and for export to Holland and Germany as well as to other parts of France. The merchants of Bordeaux were at the heart of the imperial system, providing the credit that facilitated the West India trade and writing the bills of exchange that criss-crossed the Atlantic. They dealt ...”

“... 13 different bonnets’) and, like many other decent-minded progressives, she embraces Golden Age Holland, with its high standards of social provision, gender rights and civic cleanliness, as a congenial forerunner to the good modern polity. Then she zooms in on the city of Delft (although her publishers print its map back to front) and settles on a painter ...”

“... with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’. This was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the Act of Settlement (1701) to the ...”

“... beach’ was the title of a 19th-century song that has become a saying. ‘Dear Henry,’ William James wrote to his physician friend Henry Bowditch, ‘you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle of senile degeneration.’ ‘What is a pebble?’ is the opening sentence of Clarence Ellis’s book The Pebbles on the ...”

“... artist should wish to settle either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on ...”

“... long history indeed – more than a thousand years of continuous existence, so far. This, writes James Campbell, is the defining contrast between England and the other great European states. Despite some redrawing of county boundaries in 1974, most of the administrative geography of England remains today much as it was in the tenth and 11th centuries. No ...”

“... to cake shop to frites stand, gorging themselves as they tell each other stories of wartime Holland and Germany. Anna, the German twin, provokes her sister with war nostalgia: ‘An emergency mobilises all the forces that normally lie fallow. That’s why people are so bored now. They have to go on creativity courses. That is the malaise of this ...”

“... used to these ideas, so that we do not much react when in another Oxford book, The End of Life by James Rachels, it is said that some animals have a better claim to be cared for than a severely retarded child? It may be argued that it is not of practical importance that these ‘practical’ philosophers say these things, so long as other people keep a ...”

“... in line. The Army was not literary London. In the military scale of things, the likes of General James and Colonel Conrad would, of course, look down on him. At the same time, salutes were guaranteed from Privates Lawrence, Pound and Eliot; even from Lance-Corporal Lewis. And in the Army, you got paid: paid every week, not just when you happened to get lucky ...”

“... that in an absorbing essay about elbows in Renaissance painting. She concentrates on 17th-century Holland, where one particular stance – indicating, she thinks, self-possession – almost achieved the ‘status of a national attribute’. A surprisingly large proportion of militia company portraits include one or more figures with an arm pugnaciously ...”

“... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn – I ...”

“... payments they received. Their scope was broad: one of the busiest was sent on missions to Denmark, Holland, Berwick, Flushing, Ostend, Brussels, Antwerp and Edinburgh. They reported on threats from abroad: one dispatch from Spain in 1594, where a new armada was under construction, helpfully translated a list of military preparations and their costings into ...”

“... account of Sarah’s wedding to Charles Bunbury, in which after letting us know that the chapel in Holland House where it took place ‘was two storeys high with round arched windows down the east side and an Inigo Jones ceiling’, she quotes, entirely verbatim, substantial parts of the marriage service, the best-known parts, including ‘I will.’ There can ...”

“... of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie of speaking about evil at a well-fed and well-managed conference; this was well before we got to the unspeakability of evil itself. Coetzee, by contrast, read a story ...”