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“... attended by the sheriff of Surrey; a fully robed priest; the keeper of the jail solemnly holding a white wand; and the executioner, bearing a drawn sword. Despard, in a dark greatcoat and boots, bare-headed, without wig or powder, was led out, his hands bound with rope. He burst out laughing – ‘Ha! ha!, what nonsensical mummery is this?’ – as he was ...”

“... lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language from law French, and were usually glossed as meaning ‘design’ or ‘intend’. The ...”

“... In the summer of 1797, William Godwin set out on a tour of the Midlands. He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him ...”

“... 1908 and 1917, Verse Revolutionaries is decidedly about the pursuit of what Pound called ‘the white stag, Fame’. He had a knack for it. As a friendless arriviste in London in 1908, he self-published a pamphlet at Christmas cannily called A Quinzaine for This Yule and then used the fact that it had sold out to convince Elkin Mathews to republish it under ...”

“... So they levered their way in and started to ask for more – much more. The key figures were William Morris and Abe Lastfogel (who together formed the William Morris Agency), Phil Berg, Myron Selznick (who found Vivien Leigh for his brother David), Leland Hayward and, most significant, Lew Wasserman, Ovitz’s abiding ...”

“... in evidence. Yevtushenko is master-of-ceremonies, highly visible in a zoot-suit jacket of black, white and red, like interference or a Mexican blanket. Please Do Not Adjust Your Suit. Around me, people are asking if Raisa Gorbachev has come. She hasn’t, though she attended the Bolshoi festivities the night before: our interpreter turned, saw her, said ...”

“... and added for good measure that when the Constitution was founded, a Negro had no rights that a white man was obliged to respect. This was historically false, and as Taney admitted no modification in the Constitution’s original meaning, the implications were obvious. (An interesting case, incidentally, of the doctrine of ‘original intent’.) The Dred ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... degraded slave.Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland in 1818, to a white man (probably a slaveholder) and an enslaved woman, Harriet Bailey. As he put it in his 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, his mother, ‘like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY’. Hired out to a plantation 12 ...”

“... the first person to articulate an elephant’s skeleton, was the younger brother of William Hunter. Both men were pioneering teachers of anatomy. John set up the museum to house his anatomical collection, which has been called his ‘great unwritten book’. Other such collections were either mere taxonomies or else forms of entertainment ...”

“... sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the ...”

“... one where a teenager makes a sandwich ... and the next thing you know it’s in a vitrine in a white gallery with intellectuals peering at it. Writing like this looks easy. Sauntering from subject to subject, transcribing your thoughts, taking your sentences wherever you fancy. And when things get a bit too stream-of-consciousness, ...”

“... to mass incarceration, have significantly lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than the white population, and for whom the healthcare system and the overwhelmingly segregated education system and housing market have never provided equitable care, opportunity or provision. As a result of these inequalities, they are being infected and killed at a ...”

“... Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent who was employed as a consultant on special activities at the White House. Evidence soon pointed to the other accomplice at the lookout, Gordon Liddy, legal counsel to CREEP. The situation was complicated, because in some respects the Nixon administration was investigating itself. The FBI was a division of the Justice ...”

“... gypsum alabaster and calcite or onyx alabaster. Calcite alabaster from Egypt, commonly a creamy white with more translucent golden bands, is sometimes petalled, fleecy or cloudy in pattern, and darker types can occasionally resemble toffee. Its watery origin – often as stalactites – must have been well known and probably contributed to the old idea that ...”