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“... of Tartt’s: Bunny was Edmund Wilson’s nickname); Francis Abernathy is the wimp; and the twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, are the beauties. The members of the gang have no life outside their poses. There is nothing here unmotivated, no detail that is not telling (‘he carried an umbrella, a bizarre sight in Hampden’), no revelation that is not a ...”

“... Peel, alongside British trade goods). Not for nothing did the Bishop of Oxford crown him the ‘King of Siluria’. But Murchison’s geological expansionism became more threatening. His Silurian began devouring Sedgwick’s Cambrian below, leading to a period of bitter recrimination. Sedgwick was constantly forced to fight a rearguard action, attempting to ...”

“... with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson who engaged most directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read as a massive attempt to heal what Olson saw as the fatal ...”

“... William Rees-Mogg – do not wish to argue that the Americans or, say, the Swiss ought to have a king. And many would probably be embarrassed to have the Windsors bracketed with the House of Saud or the Sultan of Brunei – although these are the only two monarchies to compare with them in wealth: the Japanese royal family, though presiding over a far richer ...”

“... the best scientific minds of her generation, Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday, William Whewell and Charles Babbage among them. The passion for numbers and experiments was inherited from Annabella, who was christened by Byron on one of their happier days ‘Princess of Parallelograms’, but in Ada it was shot through with her father’s imaginative ...”

“... on a single day at Verden on the River Aller in northern Saxony, on the orders of Charlemagne, King of the Franks.’ So, bluntly, reported the author of the Royal Frankish Annals, the main Frankish narrative for the period, which were written up in 790 or so. By the time those annals had been put into print at Cologne in 1521, Charlemagne had come to be ...”

“... the Provençal poet, is pretty dull. The book which best deserves reprinting is The Strang Life of Charles Waterton (1782-1865), a biography of the recklessly eccentric naturalist and taxidermist, published in 1949. Here was a rumbustious, unaffected figure whom Aldington could admire without reservation. Squire Waterton had a perfect contempt for social ...”

“... was only the fourth son of a Scottish nobleman, and his posting at the Court of the repulsive King Ferdinand of Naples and his clever, fecund Queen, Maria Carolina, placed him very much in the outer circle of British diplomacy. Emma was a blacksmith’s daughter who never lost her Lancashire accent. She went to London, as so many did, and saved herself ...”

“... bailed out by his father, he joined the rest of the group in the provinces. They were hired by Charles Dufresne, leader of a company attached to the household of the Duc d’Epernon at Agen. There were then a dozen or so such companies touring the provinces, many living from hand to mouth, and for the next 13 years, they played at venues mainly in the ...”

“... a structural adjustment in Church and Commonwealth, with the proceeds from dissolution giving the king money to do what good English kings were supposed to do, fight France. Equally, they might applaud the idea of returning lands to laypeople, who might find better uses for them after centuries in the dead hand of the Church. Protestants (or evangelicals, as ...”

“... In June 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Washington. Although the White House had had air-conditioning installed in its offices ten years earlier, family and guest rooms weren’t artificially cooled. Despite this, the King and Queen requested hot-water bottles, heavy-duty bedding and glasses of hot milk before bedtime ...”

“... is a chronological table to assist their memories. Speaking of Joan’s strange encounter with Charles VII at Chinon, where today the docile tourist follows his guide from mouldering tower to tower, she finds an ‘irrational element’ in history which ‘will always defy analysis’, an idea that would have been worth saying more about. Miss Warner is ...”

“... This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man who shot him’; Baudelaire’s ‘king of the blue’ brought ‘stumbling and ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are ...”

“... which confiscated a tenth of the annual value of the property of those who had supported the King. Some Major-Generals were harsher than others. Royalists breathed more easily under Major-General Whalley in the Midlands, where insurrection was held to be relatively unlikely and where Whalley had respectable local connections and was ready to mollify ...”

“... for a cabinet post, Rosina wrote to the prime minister, Lord Derby, denouncing the pair as ‘one King of Sodom and the other King of Gomorrah’. Terrified of what might emerge in a divorce hearing, Bulwer-Lytton consulted six doctors, all of whom agreed that Rosina was insane. He did nothing until June, when he was ...”