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“... possible is called out too.’Vargas Llosa’s powerful first novel, The Time of the Hero, drew on memories of the Leoncio Prado Military Academy to enforce his grim conviction of the 1960s, expressed to Luis Harss: ‘I think in a country like mine violence is at the root of all human relations.’ This led him to state, rather chillingly: ‘I’ve ...”

“... Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their construction of a particular kind of history of the dynasty, is an underlying, if undeveloped, theme of Firnhaber-Baker’s book. The vivid character sketches, scurrilous ...”

“... rhetorical currency required for any respectable courtship or commercial transaction. As a boy, Philip Sidney – whose works Richardson was later to publish, and to study with attention – was carefully trained in the art of letter writing. His bedroom, according to his early biographer Thomas Moffet, ‘overflowed with elegant epistles’ which he had ...”

“... It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces ...”

“... the 15th century, many of them educated in Buddhist pagoda schools, practised a form of rule that drew simultaneously on Chinese statecraft, charismatic familial leadership and Buddhism. The move towards Confucian models of governance came very late, most intensively under the 19th-century Nguyen dynasty, and were no match for the French colonial ...”

“... in a vast institution, upon which as a creative writer with a somewhat limited imagination he drew for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhausting and exasperating this may have been, but it wasn’t, as West concludes, ‘soul-destroying work’. We can set aside the excessive claims West makes for individual pieces, as well as the illfounded suggestion that Orwell ...”

“... works hard and artily to allegorise what happened in 1979 (‘When approached by a visitor, he drew back as if a deadly fear gripped him’), and sets the book up as the real story of a great storyteller: ‘Gradually, a complex image appeared, more mysterious than any of the stories he chose to film.’ John Russell Taylor is more modest, and more ...”

“... with a country beyond the sea, or rather a dynasty beyond the sea. She married Charles’s son Philip, and once she was married she was desperate to secure a Catholic future by having his child. That child might with the right quirks of genealogy have ruled half the known world, and a good deal of it not then known: an empire combining Spanish and ...”

“... offered the Polish crown: absurd, but can there be smoke without any fire whatsoever? In May 1575, Philip Sidney returned to Little England. If England was small beer, so was he, no baron but plain Mr Sidney. He was 20 years of age. Sidney’s career makes a bizarre episode in that endless saga which is Britain-in-Europe. To understand why so much was ...”

“... Words without Music​ is Philip Glass’s second book about himself, and it inevitably includes some of the same information, or the same kind of information, as its predecessor, published in 1987 in New York as Music by Philip Glass and in London as Opera on the Beach. But the differences are significant ...”

“... physis and nomos, and this made me think the antithesis a premonition of the one which Galton drew between nature and nurture. I liked this and was pleased to see that my children’s edition of Liddell and Scott renders nomos as a ‘feeding-place for cattle, pasture’. Nisbet enfolds the history and literary usage of ‘anomy’ with the degree of ...”

“... Philip Ward-Jackson’s Public Sculpture of the City of London* is the seventh volume of Public Sculpture of Britain. It does for public sculpture (but not sculpture inside churches or galleries) what Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner do for the buildings the sculpture is on (or near) in The Buildings of England volume on The City of London ...”

“... taken a tentative step into day one of Ever After and look back at this generous distraction, like Philip Larkin’s Whitsun wedding guests: free at last and loaded with the sum of all we have seen. There has been a feast of seeing. The handsome commemorative books setting this event in its context of past and recent history are dominated by photographs and ...”

“... Braudel is different. His thesis, on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, was certainly long enough and ambitious enough – the first edition of the book ran to some six hundred thousand words, and it has since been considerably enlarged. As a result of the war, most of which he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp near ...”

“... the world’s markets’: these were the deaths that interested them. The English journalist Sir Philip Gibbs drew up a list of known millionaires. At the top of the league were Colonel Astor (£30 million), Ben Guggenheim, Peggy Guggenheim’s father (£20 million) and Isidor Straus, the owner of Macy’s (£10 ...”