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“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... be bluster intended to bilk investors and treasuries of money. In July 2021 two pilots flew Richard Branson and a few of his employees on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft towards the Kármán Line, considered to be the edge of space. Virgin Galactic plans to sell seats on its spacecraft for £360,000. A few days after Branson’s trip, Bezos flew ten miles ...”

“... this or that physical attribute, or name, or occupation, or address. Readers familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after ...”

“... creditable. And here figure Mairi MacInnes, Miriam Levine (two), Gerry Loose, Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, ...”

“... where verbal insult is injury, punishable as crime. Helen Benedict’s Virgin and Vamp and Gregory Matoesian’s Reproducing Rape are part of this assault: they seek to combat rape by reforming the way it is described. Although Benedict’s book is a journalist’s critique of rape coverage in the press and Matoesian’s a technical ...”

“... great names trip off the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to ...”

“... the actors.’It’s a pity these lines from Amours de Voyage are relegated to the endnotes in Gregory Tate’s new edition of Clough’s writings, which opts for the first published versions of the texts. Given that Clough was pre-eminently a poet of ‘after-thoughts’ and ‘counter-thoughts’, this seems a questionable choice. It’s true that his ...”

“... the labelling of Bryant as ‘naive’: surely he was no more so than the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours? Indeed he may well still be being widely read as authoritative in some quarters, just as the Le Pens of this world will go on reading Gregory and his modern retailers because it suits their purposes. Ethnicity ...”

“... issued over the course of that summer by the CIA or the White House anti-terrorism co-ordinator, Richard Clarke, to the effect that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack inside the United States. Clarke’s name doesn’t appear in the index, or in any of the supplementary documents posted by Rumsfeld on his website, www. rumsfeld.com. Other sources attest ...”

“... over the details of the role of aircraft in the First World War. This omission is made good by Richard Hallion, whose superb Taking Flight tracks the ‘human desire to fly’ from Leonardo da Vinci onwards. According to Hallion, aviation first proved its military worth at the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, when the Germans, using aerial ...”

“... the creation of a voice, that of a bitter, troubled but smart 15-year-old Texan schoolboy, Vernon Gregory Little. Vernon narrates the book, and hurls his spiked words right at us. At his best, Pierre captures a pathetic combination of defensive cynicism and pain. Vernon hates his stupid, materialistic mother, who spends most of the novel waiting longingly for ...”

“... situation of 1930s Germany, with the architect modelling the relationship of ‘Hans Pfitzner or Richard Strauss, or Furtwängler, or Paul Hindemith to a patron resembling Goebbels’. He suggests that Prince’s early poetic experiments were ‘influenced by the styles of political, economic and literary criticism as these were presented – or, as some ...”

“... own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The ...”

“... the Jacobin ascendancy in France, he was widely known to be (in the words of his father-in-law, Richard Edgeworth) a ‘little fat democrat’, utterly hostile to the corrupt, repressive and belligerent government of Pitt, which enjoyed, however, huge support among those with the longest purses. And perhaps, for all his hyperbolic puffing of the therapeutic ...”

“... past their limits as artists or actors or technicians, and made them propel their material, Richard Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of ...”