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“... language but also French, still the language of diplomacy long after the First World War, and English, usually because they’d been brought up by a British nanny, an essential member of the household for the European nobility. Wilhelm of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was a regular reader of the Illustrated London News, the Bukarester Tageblatt and ...”

“... heaped on them; and his challenge to the most potent name in Greek historiography provoked from Richard Shilleto, a Cambridge don, a riposte entitled simply Thucydides or Grote? That may be a more complex question than Shilleto realised. Thucydides argued that the Athenian Empire was hated by its subject peoples; admirers of Athenian democracy are naturally ...”

“... National Museum of Wales is currently staging a large loan exhibition of the Welsh ‘father of English landscape’, Richard Wilson, curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a ...”

“... literature has graduated from the status of a cult work to that of a classic. Rereading it in English, a decade after my first, rather sceptical perusal, it is easy to see why. Much of what made Theweleit’s book so startlingly original in the mid-Seventies has since become relatively conventional in literary and historical studies, from the Foucaultian ...”

“... by an urge to find irony where none is intended. Much of my response might well be put down to an English suspicion of the translation of a familiar process into the language of American Freudian psychology. Allied to this I am suspicious of the application of any methodology, not excluding those of Stanislavsky and Brecht, to the process of rehearsing a ...”

“... all rather shabby and haphazard. It was not for want of money – Lydia was very well off, though Richard Kahn, a Cambridge economist and Keynes’s literary executor, was tight-fisted with her allowance. The pictures were not well arranged or dusted – when I took one down, the skeleton of a small bird fell out from behind it. ‘They do not belong to ...”

“... this was not the right answer. But it was a response. It showed something that was lacking in the English lecturer who told me that what most worried him about Crossroads was the anarchy. Everyone by now – everyone, that is, outside South Africa – knows what happened at Crossroads. They know how the authorities, to ingratiate themselves with a compliant ...”

“... tangled with the toffs at the Geological Society, Smith was acknowledged as the ‘father of English geology’ and the geological timescale was born. As an aside, we are invited to sneer at Dean Buckland of Oxford, who interpreted the bones found in caves in Yorkshire as direct evidence of the biblical deluge, thereby kowtowing to the clerics of the ...”

“... with both authority and imagination is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been ...”

“... We’ve​ got form, Michael Gove and I. ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate ...”

“... of studies – 105 secondary sources are listed in the latest account – that already exist. Richard Fisher, a Yale history graduate, is a ‘full-time writer’ who has ‘found time to take an MSc in brain sciences’, and he has turned Jenner’s life into a hagiographic fairy-tale. Until now, his efforts have largely been directed towards a ...”

“... more general interest. Sabbatai Sevi was born in 1626, the son of a Jewish assistant to the Dutch, English and French merchants then living in Smyrna (now Izmir). He was a brilliant student, with an impressive knowledge and understanding of Jewish texts. But then, after periods of fasting followed by moments of ecstasy, he began violating the fundamental ...”

“... Day’. And they’ll wince at his verdict on filming The Hasty Heart (1950) at Elstree: ‘English picture-making is a strange combination of tremendously talented, creative people and incredible inefficiency that makes everything take longer than it should. Our set was a marvel of design and perspective, our cameraman without a peer, the cast truly ...”

“... There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is still maintained here, at St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. The first thing you notice is an exotic Rumanian screen, for St Dunstan’s is much used by members of a Rumanian Church in communion with the Church of England ...”

“... as just another way of talking about this kind of telegraph, and both words slid swiftly into English following the French system’s unprecedented success; the adoption of ‘telegraph’ as a newspaper title came as early as 1794. It was also the obvious term to use to describe the new undersea cables, carrying the concept across to quite different (and ...”