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“... well that ends well. Just what two/ Young gentlemen of Verona might any day do,’ as Frederick Clayton comments in a brilliant modern epilogue to the play. As with Shakespeare’s bed tricks, it’s hard to know how much we are supposed to worry about the rapes in Terence. On the one hand, they are a useful plot device. The victim can remain ...”

“... you while you are making a ludicrously maladroit attempt to swaddle a stolen painting in brown paper. Fly into a sulk. Bundle the poor girl into your car, and when she protests, silence her with a hammer, noting, as you do so, that its impact on her skull is like hitting clay or hard putty. (You are brilliantly obsessed by details.) Drive thirty ...”

“... anger of Henry James, when he discovered that the novel she had dedicated to him, Miss Brown, contained diminishing portraits of a large number of his acquaintances. William and Lucy Rossetti appeared as a stodgy reviewer with a shallow, garrulous wife obsessed by the charms of her children. William and Jane Morris never forgave her for a clearly ...”

“... own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little Richard. Bouncing around with Jenkins, who had ...”

“... and must haves, and at times Laite takes it too far: ‘When the cable arrived at Scotland Yard, Frederick Bullock’s fist must have hit his desk.’ Must it? What if Bullock (a detective) was not the fist-thumping type?The nice rich couple Harvey told her mother about were in fact an Italian pimp, Antonio Carvelli, and his wife, an Australian prostitute ...”

“... in Rome. Dickens recognised the artist’s models loitering on the Spanish Steps: ‘The man in a brown cloak, who leans against a wall, with his arms folded in his mantle, and looks out of the corners of his eyes: which are just visible beneath his broad slouched hat. This is the assassin model.’ In August 1845, soon after his return to London, Dickens was ...”

“... in Paris at the age of 15. Family relationships were complicated by the fact that their father, Frederick Miller, an American, had married his step-mother’s niece, Clara; Agatha’s step-grandmother was therefore also her great-aunt. They settled in a large villa on the outskirts of Torquay. In the morning ...”

“... his ship containing ‘a mass of corpses huddled together … everywhere crimson mingling with the brown, and here and there a waxen-white face with draggled hair staring up into the smiling heavens … Such was our introduction to the glories of war.’ Several men were burned alive. ‘The carnage it caused is awful,’ a Turkish lieutenant wrote after one ...”

“... as it was commonly termed, could not have occurred as and when it did. Nor would the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90) and a vast German army (Tyerman thinks contemporary figures of 85,000 to 150,000 exaggerate, but is too good a historian to risk guessing by how much) have marched on the Third Crusade in what they believed were the footsteps of the ...”

“... never tired of slaughtering birds and animals. Baker was a daring, wealthy ‘sportsman’. Frederick Courtenay Selous, as DNB styles him (my hotel’s original begetter seems to have borrowed his middle name and misspelt it), was manifestly not an explorer. Kathryn Tidrick, in her admirable study, labels him an ‘adventurer’. He was a dedicated if ...”

“... scholars? The ‘Montaigne’s mind’ approach may have produced its excesses, as perhaps with Frederick Rider’s ‘anal retentive’ monsieur: but it’s false to imply that Montaigne scholarship is an Augean stables, and the condescension aimed at the late Richard Sayce seems quite gratuitous. The crusading zeal against the ET heresy frequently becomes ...”

“... an effect of light, which frightens one, rejoices another, and agitates all?’ Joanne Frederick​ was brought in by ambulance; ‘agitated delirium’ was written across the top of her triage sheet. The medical history came from her flatmate: she’d been suffering with a head cold for a few days, feeling weak and under the weather, and had gone ...”

“... You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free is the vernacular confession of Jeremiah Brown, a 34-year-old Glaswegian exile. After 12 years in America, Jerry is coming home. His mother, whom he hasn’t seen for eight years, is ill, and in any case he could use a change of scenery, if only to break a streak of lousy luck. He has been struggling to ...”

“... intently, thoughtfully – not a man to be underestimated – while his close colleague Sir Frederick Phillips looks as though he has been propped up against a wall by a Keynesian commando as one of the usual suspects but carries a despondent air of being wrongly accused. Much more satisfactorily typecast as one of the guilty men is Sir Otto ...”

“... or foreign management at the highest level. Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Frederick Warne and Longman – all once imprints with independent identities – now congregate within the Pearson group (best known for its ownership of the Financial Times). Random House UK (whose American parent was long since swallowed up by RCA) own ...”