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“... come they are almost immortal?’, or to use Martianus Capella’s term, borrowed by C.S. Lewis, longaevi. Perhaps they weren’t human after all. Once again there was a hardline view: they were spirits, and since they weren’t angels they must be devils, which meant that those who believed in elf queens dancing in green meadows – in the words of a ...”

“... knew, crossed swords with Hugh Trevor-Roper over the state of the Elizabethan aristocracy and with Geoffrey Elton over the question of Tudor despotism. Stone’s favourite theme at that time was ‘The Coming of the English Revolution’. Looking back from the later 17th century, Lord Clarendon once remarked that he was ‘not so sharp-sighted as those who ...”

“... if you had known what to look for, just as you would have spotted his counterpart in MI5, Sir John Lewis Jones, in the honours list immediately prior to that). What, then, is the point of the fantastic governmental mumbo-jumbo with which the British ‘Secret Service’ surrounds itself? Although it is a rather youthful bureaucratic invention, only about ...”

“... Four years ago he was the victim of what was generally regarded as a loathsome biography by Roger Lewis, who presented him as a pompous, psychologically damaged second-rater. Lewis’s biography was no fun to read, but it was interesting for what it revealed about responses to the unfashionable. It was written by a lapsed ...”

“... a rolling-pin. The best succeed by subverting and ostentatiously coarsening the form, as Wyndham Lewis did: So there you have (in this political age) The secret of the dishonour of the sage – The one that’s young enough to have some teeth The one that’s suspected honest underneath. Lewis’s own teeth were all on ...”

“... about. As rewritten for John Major’s times, England’s epic is all regression. Gilgamesh is Lewis Carroll in disguise: the Queen of Hearts raves uninterruptedly through 11 sanguinary, doom-sodden chapters, then at the end Alice pops out and tells everybody to behave. Where does Selbourne’s stance fit in relation to ongoing international debates about ...”

“... But why does it follow that ateliers are the answer, or even an answer? ‘Both Pound and Wyndham Lewis were American or Americanised enough to have on the contrary a professional attitude to their respective arts, in the quite precise sense that they saw the continuity of art traditions ensured by the atelier, the master instructing his prentices. The ...”

“... diary and the letters she exchanged with her cousin Franklin Roosevelt, found and edited by Geoffrey Ward) and No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the home front during World War Two) are products of the current obsession with the private lives of public figures. But the books about the President’s women are ...”

“... Three years later, a newly-elected Labour government set up another secret inquiry by a barrister, Lewis Hawser QC. Hawser did for James Hanratty what another barrister, Scott Henderson, had done for Timothy Evans, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of his child. By concentrating on minute differences of detail in witness statements, he managed to ...”

“... new interpretations. There’s nothing very left-wing about this. Conservative historians like Lewis Namier and Geoffrey Elton have rewritten history in hugely influential ways. Historians of all stripes need to reclaim history as a contentious, critical and diverse discipline against the attempts of ignorant and ...”

“... industry over the span of my grandmother’s life is fairly remarkable. In 1916, according to Geoffrey Jones, a business historian, only ‘one fifth of Americans may have used any toiletry or cosmetics.’ This would mean that four fifths of Americans used neither toothpaste nor shampoo, never mind moisturiser or deodorant, lipstick or hair gel. In ...”

“... Audenaire’: he was a name such that a pun might be made of it. The contribution of Geoffrey Grigson, New Verse’s editor, was promisingly entitled ‘Auden as a Monster’: his prodigiousness does seem to have had something about it that could be rather shattering. The year after the New Verse special a thinly disguised Auden was the star turn ...”

“... were all either written or ‘current’ in England between 1138 – the probable date of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, not itself a romance but, as it turned out, a rich quarry for romance writers, including Malory – and the death of Shakespeare in 1616. Although she (rather surprisingly perhaps) admits some ...”

“... Foreign Policy Centre. In his recent polemic, Lawfare (Harper, £10.99), the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson identifies three reasons why autocrats, kleptocrats and multinationals are so fond of London’s libel courts. First, English media law is claimant friendly. Second, British courts – much like British company registrations – have a veneer ...”

“... his bank job (at the time the epitome of secure and respectable employment) to take on a role in Geoffrey Faber’s new publishing firm, and he was about to expose the patchiness of his scholarship by giving a set of lectures to an exacting audience of Cambridge dons. Ruin was still a possibility, even if not a vocation, and the main interest of the third ...”