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“... are jokes scattered elsewhere about other 1790s works, including the ‘philosophical novels’ of William Godwin and his school. Nightmare Abbey’s isolated coastal setting draws on Godwin’s Mandeville (published in 1817, when Peacock probably read it with the Shelleys), a work caricatured in the novel as ‘Devilman, a novel’, all ‘Hatred – revenge ...”

“... work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely ...”

“... to a Manichean world-view. Madness, he insists, was for 18th-century Englishmen an extremely broad sociocultural category. Separately or simultaneously, its manifestations could be seen as medical, moral, religious or even satanic. It belonged to the body or the brain, or to the mind or the soul. It extended and ramified in all manner of directions, and ...”

“... view’ would ‘significantly enhance’ the capacity of either side to wage war. Within these broad parameters, it appears that the guidelines were broadly adhered to for the duration of the war – i.e. until August 1988. According to Scott, they were from the start ‘consistently represented’ to be government policy. In a letter written in December ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... was ‘stupid looking’. Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of ...”

“... female nudity.His parents’ attitudes and values continued to vein his character. They were broad-minded in certain ways, and Ede inherited that flair, but he also shared some of the inhibitions he decried. As a friend and patron he ‘gave with the generosity of the Magi’, as Freeman puts it. He was a celebrated host to artists, writers and other ...”

“... argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to him, was not for him. This became his pattern of behaviour at ...”

“... told, much less filmed, so perhaps it is worth restating the main lines. In 1787, Lieutenant William Bligh, RN, aged 33, was given the command of HM Armed Vessel Bounty of 215 tons and four four-pounder guns, a merchantman bought by the Navy Board and fitted up with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, who was then guiding Kew towards its glorious future, as a ...”

“... with Kissinger, ‘in poor form: bitter at the attacks on him from his own side and indignant over William Shawcross’s vendetta against him’, or suffering, like Heath, ‘from post-power frustration’. His observations of Henry and Nancy Kissinger are among his better examples of the higher gossip: I am reading Kissinger’s book with intense pleasure ...”

“... the same as that of light. British natural philosophers, led by the prodigious Glasgow professor William Thomson, liked this kind of model, because they reckoned dynamical machinery was uniquely comprehensible and informative. Trained to think in terms of the physics of gyroscopes, pulleys, pumps, calf’s-foot jelly or rubber bands, they extended this ...”

“... than they will tolerate an attempt to steer the party away from socialism – the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either ...”

“... and Mr Round to be no gentleman’ is also in a tone not characteristic of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and ...”

“... enough. Even when writing those diverting and malicious short stories his eye had been on ‘the broad fields of the Continental novel’. To have the freedom of these fields while preserving the great richness of our own social, ethical tradition ought to be the ultimate aim of the serious English novelist today. Good and evil are the touchstones. It is in ...”

“... at the time, one can sometimes imagine him as a young Anglo-Saxon, rather like the narrator in William Gerhardie’s novel Futility, standing unobtrusively to the side of the action, a little in love with the lives he’s describing and at the same time worried about these people on whom so many difficulties have been inflicted, his grandmother ...”