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“... of the 19th century could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars, who has chosen to do nothing for a living and regrets it, reels off four possibilities:I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for ...”

“... place in church because it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane ...”

“... a saint that the executioners cut off his head. The litany of holy violence culminates in St James the Dismembered, whose legend could have inspired an episode in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Slain finger by finger and toe by toe, this martyr responds to the loss of each digit with a Bible verse or a prayer. Only when the 27th stroke has severed his ...”

“... of the less well known of these, such as Anthony Hamilton, an Anglo-Irish Jacobite who followed James II to France and there, writing in French, inaugurated the tradition of elegant mockery of the excesses of The Arabian Nights that opened the way for the rationalist arabesques of Voltaire and others. Warner might have included many more. ...”

“... offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who ...”

“... Lincolnshire clergyman, a 19-year-old Harrovian and a Chamonix guide. They were the casualties of Edward Whymper’s successful assault on the Matterhorn in 1865, lost during the descent; a tragedy supposedly honoured by nature with an enormous fog-bow, incorporating two crosses. Whymper survived with two Swiss guides, father and son. The English chaplain of ...”

“... will be curious to read the future story of this intricate Warre,’ the royalist pamphleteer James Howell wrote in 1644, ‘will find himself much stagger’d, and put to a kind of riddle.’ There is still no consensus on its name: is it the English Civil War or the Puritan Revolution or the British Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three ...”

“... possibilities providing the principal subject of plays as diverse as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall (1603-5), Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632). According to Perry, this is in large part because the favourite made conveniently visible a central problem with ...”

“... was more than outweighed by highly respectable contributions from the likes of Edmund Gosse, Henry James and even John Buchan. Yet many of the illustrations did shock and even revolt, and Lane was to sack Beardsley when the backwash from the Wilde scandal hit the Bodley Head. ‘Wilde!’ wrote Lambert, in one of his few stylistic lapses. ‘The very name is ...”

“... sphygmomanometers that had become available for the accurate measurement of blood pressure. Sir James Mackenzie, the patron, and Thomas Lewis, the leader of the scientific school and as much a physiologist as a physician, still held that ‘the trained finger’ was the best instrument for measuring arterial pressure. Science made perhaps its first ...”

“... What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also defends for their historical interest, relishing for example in The Spiral Ascent the word and the concept ‘poshocrat’. Like all Bagshaw-type historians, both Kermode and Cobb delight not only in the objects but in the attitudes ...”

“... impulse’ and ‘moral insanity’ had allowed the would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, Edward Oxford, to escape the gallows three years previously. The doctors, for their part, criticised the M’Naghten Rules for failing to take any account of the unconscious. What, they asked, was the law to do with murderers who were rational, conscious of ...”

“... instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking shamelessly through public ...”

“... call this a metathesis: ‘A raven is like a writing desk because it bodes ill for owed bills’ (James Michie). Barthes goes on to say: ‘Everything is always the same,’ says the true palindrome; whether you take things in one direction or the other, the truth remains. ‘Everything can assume an opposite meaning,’ says Arcimboldo’s ...”

“... turn into a prodigal son and ‘walk the Hospitals, Enter at the Temple, or mount Guard at St James’. In later letters surrealism is replaced by the quieter nonsense she patiently wrote to her brothers’ children (her dislike was general, not particular) in backwards spelling or in a cousin of the B language (‘mo up in the Poach’). She emerges as a ...”