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“... until the appointed hour for his interview with an old queen in Deal, or with the executed traitor William Joyce’s daughter, by his second wife, in Gillingham. Carry On grotesques, professional alcoholics, poets suffering with their nerves, Broadstairs fascists, economic migrants of every stamp: all the devils are here. From the areal to Ariel, Seabrook ...”

“... scrutinise. The drama plays out against palm trees, pyramids and Nile boats, with top billing for white European men. A few Americans and Englishwomen take minor roles; Egyptians are somewhere in the wings.Egyptians ‘care not one jot for their history’, Weigall told his readers, and almost a century on, Wilkinson takes it as given that West is best; to ...”

“... How different parliaments are in our day. In the cabinet, Lincoln’s chief supporter and guide is William Seward, his secretary of state, played with all kinds of grace and irony by David Strathairn; and in the House his opponent and ultimate ally is Thaddeus Stevens, a witty and domineering abolitionist, represented by an extraordinary black wig that has ...”

“... Duke of Lennox, painted in 1633. The former is a small picture: you look at it close. Threads of white paint highlight the old man’s hair, beard, watering eye and damp lip. Paint and flesh exchange substance. The same is true of a picture in the exhibition of another old man – the Earl of Arundel – probably painted in 1620, during Van Dyck’s first ...”

“... him or those around him. His loathing of Sir James Mackintosh (’the great Dung-fly’) and of William Pitt are the clearest expressions of self-contempt; his troubles with Charles Lloyd and Thomas de Quincey stem from a mutual or compound confusion of identities; and he inspired the same bitter disillusionment in his quondam admirers (most spectacularly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”