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“... on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class ...”

“... dreadful old men’ (as Queen Victoria later dubbed them in a letter to Uncle Leopold of Belgium), Russell and Palmerston. It was the Court which prodded the coalition into being at the end of 1852 under Peel’s heir, Aberdeen. The Crimean War was as much of a disaster to Albert as it was to Aberdeen. Albert made no secret of his detestation of Palmerston ...”

“... of the Guards to Finchley (1750), in the Foundling Museum, formerly the Foundling Hospital, near Russell Square. There are only three Hogarths there, but it is absolutely the best place to enjoy his amazing variety without getting tired. The scene of the March of the Guards to Finchley is Tottenham Court Road turnpike, looking up towards Highgate on its ...”

“... but vertical in format and entirely without saccharine optimism and uniform cheerfulness. José Maria Sert’s Saint Teresa, Ambassadress of Divine Love in Spain, Offers to Our Lord the Spanish Martyrs of 1936 is an altarpiece, painted in earth colours on gold, which employs the Counter-Reformation iconography of intercession and ascent. The heroes – of ...”

“... women had to try to pad out their breasts, to match the attractions of bosomy stars like Rosalind Russell, Marilyn Monroe or the egregious Jayne Mansfield. Brassieres entered the consciousness already colonised by Freud, and anxiety about bosom shape afflicted all women, even young girls who were urged to get into a ‘training bra’ as soon as they ...”

“... the wall which I’m currently engaged on, is to be able to visit Cornelissen’s shop in Great Russell Street, which sells all manner of paints and colours and where I go this morning in order to find some varnish to seal the surface of the plaster. After I’d finished putting on all the greenish-yellow colour yesterday I did some trial patches of varnish ...”

“... serene pasture of the Tidewater, a secluded place hemmed around by undulant oak trees, my departed Maria was standing before me, with the abandon of a strumpet stripping down to the flesh – she who had never removed in my presence so much as her bobbysocks. Naked, peach-ripe, chestnut hair flowing across her creamy breasts, desirable beyond utterance, she ...”

“... of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the Berkshires, epitomises the family legacy of social ...”

“... on by the new pacifist friends he had made on his excursions to Garsington – notably Bertrand Russell and the Morrells, not to mention Robbie Ross, as loyal and wise a friend to Sassoon as he had been to Oscar Wilde. But he made it in his own way, and when he had made it, he characteristically refused to pursue it in the way they wanted, by doing ...”

“... is a splendid, thoughtless physical type, who surprisingly marries his chorus-girl mistress (Maria Muggins, stage name Cynthia de Vere) and sinks into a life of matrimonial misery, presented by Sturgis with a telling mixture of relish and revulsion. But Claude is something more troubling; his ‘latent sensuality’ at the age of 13 creates a ‘vague ...”

“... consideration, her primary sexual relations were with women, one girlfriend being the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, a Greenwich Village vortex born in Havana who had been involved in a triangle with Mailer and his second wife, Adele Morales (yes, the one he stabbed), which must have made for some lively evenings. Laid-waste-to lovers lauded Fornes as an ...”

“... a philosophic self-portrait – the poseur in cavalier ringlets contemplating a skull, as if Russell Brand were to land the role of Hamlet. But composure was not Rosa’s métier. He took fright when the Chigi, butts of his satire, took over the papacy in 1655, sent his mistress and their son out of town, then cursed his own cowardice: ‘Am I the person ...”