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“... the Order of St John, Knights Hospitaller at Rhodes is an example; another is a Dalmatian Life of Alexander the Great that circulated in the coastal town of Zadar. Religious foundations and pilgrimage explain the inclusion of more far-flung places like Kirkwall Cathedral on Orkney, Lough Derg (an Irish island shrine dedicated to St Patrick), and Glasney ...”

“... relics. It was his breach of this oath that gave William the moral high ground and caused Pope Alexander II to grant his expedition the status of a proto-Crusade, complete with appropriately blessed banner. Wood doubts the whole story of papal benediction, which has no non-Norman corroboration. But what was Harold doing across the Channel in any case? The ...”

“... that he well deserved to be king who knew how to conquer’ – some even compared him to Alexander the Great. The point they were making was a substantial one. Legitimacy was, as Henry did not scruple to make plain, determined by conquest as well as by blood, and the mandate of heaven had clearly been withdrawn from the hapless Richard. The ...”

“... a takeover by a Kuwaiti oil fund. Scotland’s water is still in public ownership, and the Welsh get water from a non-profit company. Meanwhile, in the absence of drinking fountains there are bottles, and more bottles. Given the scale of our mania for bottled water, it is hardly as exclusive as Roundhay Park believes. Bottled water is not an ...”

“... have looked like the saviours of Christian civilisation. In 1496 that worldly sophisticate Pope Alexander VI recognised this by awarding Catherine’s parents the title of ‘Catholic Monarchs’. Shrewd dynastic marriages for their children linked the Catholic Monarchs to the rulers of Portugal, the Low Countries and Habsburg Germany and ensured that their ...”

“... a hero. Hereward no doubt did his best in East Anglia, and Eadric the Wild more obscurely on the Welsh marches, but there wasn’t much there for a proud Englishman to be proud of. Something of an industry grew up to massage the bruised national ego – see for instance Kipling’s Sir Richard Dalyngridge stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards ...”

“... are​ problems that the international system of refugee protection is supposed to address, but as Alexander Betts and Paul Collier argue in Refuge, the system isn’t working. The 1951 Refugee Convention, the founding document of today’s system, ‘sets out the morally incontrovertible idea that people who face serious harm in their country of origin should ...”

“... to teach me to keep quiet. One’s legs often got felt up as a child. Dad’s old headmaster, Mr Alexander, used to give us lessons in algebra and he was a great stroker and clutcher, though only of the legs and not the parts appertaining. Vicars did it too, without seeming to want to take it further. It was something I came to expect, and just another of ...”

“... be Johnny Weissmuller. Whizzing down the waterslide into the swimming pool. Discovering high tea: Welsh rarebit, trifle.Stamps. Donald started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the ...”

“... a map on the warm bonnet of the car, catching at its flapping corners in awkward gusts of Welsh wind. We are on a camping holiday, we are lost, and he is trying to tame the map so we don’t get loster. The high, solid hedgerows obscure the view and are not marked on the map. Nor are the wild raspberries that grow in the hedgerows. Nor is the ...”

“... remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous attractiveness by assuming the guise of Robin Hood and his men; while in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor the lawless antics of Falstaff and his crew ...”

“... to the cause of sanitary reform if the fantastic tricks recently played by an eccentric Welsh octogenarian … became indirectly the means to bring … a little more common sense to bear … on the important subject of cremation’.Yet, entertaining as all this is, in a macabre key, the dead are hard to think about – and, in many ways, to read ...”

“... of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But perhaps the question to be asked is: why should a heterosexual writer adopt a gay point of view? What’s the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept that the ...”

“... Reg and Catherine (‘Kit’) Hazzard’s two daughters. She liked to claim that her parents were Welsh and Scottish but Brigitta Olubas has uncovered hazier beginnings, including illegitimacy and uncertain birth records for both parents, and for Reg, whose early life was, Hazzard said, ‘shrouded in unspeakability’, shakily documented adoption.A British ...”

“... is the most touching of romantic shrines. In a grotto below an ancient church lies the tomb of Alexander Griboyedov, the author of Woe from Wit and the inventor of the original angry young man, the unhappy Chatsky. Beside him is his wife, the Georgian princess Nino Chavchavadze. Griboyedov married her in 1828, when she was 16. But only a few months later ...”