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“... Robert Ferguson’s title has already been used at least twice for Viking-related works, which makes one wonder about his subtitle: what’s ‘new’ in Viking studies? The history of the Vikings has been well known, in outline, for a long time. By early medieval standards, we have very good documentation for it, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Frankish and Irish annals, with further contributions from Arab and Byzantine sources, while the Icelanders’ passion for sagas and poems means that we also have versions of the Vikings’ side of the story ...”

“... which I have had with the artist whilst writing on the early drawings and since seeing the Hay ward exhibition. The group of drawings at the beginning of the exhibition at the Hay ward dates front the Forties – drawings of tense wide-eyed people, the acutest of them Lucian Freud himself, as well as of isolated ...”

“... far as the beginning of the century. In a paper published in 1913, the gifted young anthropologist Robert Hertz, soon to be killed in the First World War, studied the cult of Saint Besse as an expression of the values of an Alpine community, ‘taking us inside the consciousness, otherwise so distant and so closed, of the mountain people’. In his Medieval ...”

“... Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful memoir, In ...”

“... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...”

“... It’s​ nearly fifty years since Robert Kennedy was shot as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The date was 5 June 1968; and he had just won a narrow victory in the California Democratic primary. The gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant angry about Kennedy’s support for Israel, fired three shots at close range ...”

“... pocket, is a detective called Pinkerton. The hulking young bodyguard with two conspicuous guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who proves to be almost as formidable an adherent as Joab was to King David of Israel. There had been a plot to kill Lincoln at Baltimore: that is why the new President has ‘snuck in like some old chicken thief’ – to use the words of one of ...”

“... as the decline of its importance into what, so ironic for the Nights, we call bedtime stories. Robert Irwin’s Companion will describe how these humble and mainly entertaining street stories grew into an enormously influential masterpiece. He will talk about the way the themes in these stories manifest themselves; he will point out their motifs and ...”

“... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on ...”

“... of the 19th century. For example, his work made a deep impression on the young and precocious Mary Ward, later better known as Mrs Humphry Ward, author of the hugely successful Robert Elsmere (1888). Through the good offices of her uncle, Matthew Arnold, she met Renan in Paris, and thanks ...”

“... abdominal pain, vomiting and a rash. They were admitted that evening to the infectious diseases ward of the local hospital. The most likely diagnosis was thought to be a severe viral infection – but not smallpox. However, at 12.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 4 April a social worker from Camden rang the hospital to tell them that Mrs Hurley senior had recently been ...”

“... is devoid of love and laughter.’ He goes to a cremation. He visits his mother in the pre-natal ward and is allowed (rather improbably) to watch the birth of his baby sister. He knows, too, that the baby’s father is the next-door neighbour, Mr Lucas. At school he has his own girlfriend, a little older and a good deal cleverer and better-off than ...”

“... Pound (‘the pathos of the loony, traitorous, filthslinging poet in his cage at Pisa or in his ward in the Washington asylum’), to ‘restricted and jejune Eliot’ – Over the Missouri, over the Seine,   Over the Thames, and over the Severn, The soul of white Tom   Shall float to Heaven – to Hardy’s ‘rather monotonously small follower ...”

“... Duchess with hers, can add much detail but little new basic knowledge, even though Freda Dudley Ward has for the first time broken her silence about her 16-year-long friendship with the Duke when he was Prince. The authors seem indifferent to the perils of the libel laws and in consequence write with refreshing if unchivalrous candour, but unfortunately ...”

“... has cancer and is in intensive care at the Royal Free. Because of staff shortages her ward has to close down at weekends and on Friday she was wheeled across the hospital to a ward where, with men on one side, women on the other, there was scarcely room to move between the beds and several patients were ...”