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“... character is named Peepgass he will also be scrawny and ineffectual. Irony, in other words, is not king in these pages. Wolfe’s declared chief ambition is to have himself described as Dickensian, but it’s not only the names that let him down. (In The Bonfire of the Vanities an old firm is called Dunning, Sponget and Leach; in A Man in Full we encounter a ...”

“... History of Reynard the Fox into colloquial modern English. The book opens with the lion, the king of the beasts, calling the animals to court to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. The first thing we learn about Reynard is that he doesn’t want to go. The second thing we learn is that he doesn’t want to go because he has pissed on the faces of the ...”

“... The meanings of ‘Fascism’ and ‘National Socialism’ are quite well discussed in Roger Scruton’s cold-hearted Dictionary of Political Thought (1982). For me (born in 1931) and for many of my generation, ‘Fascism’ means a system of government which angers us and reminds us of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. A fear of ...”

“... brilliance of an enormous circle of flames the homage of the Seneschal in golden robes before his King.’ This is fine writing of a very particular type, hardly conducive to the equable flow of narrative and producing instead the occasional, carefully judged effect of an accelerating pace which falters before the moment of vision. It is a type of writing ...”

“... levy was designed to allow Henry VIII to take advantage of the defeat and capture of the King of France to prosecute his French claims. The title was not just a piece of newspeak: it expressed a crucial ambiguity in Late Medieval constitutional thinking. The King must not tax without consent, but in a case of ...”

“... up in the Thirties – in my case, in the late Thirties. I arrived at Westminster School, as a King’s Scholar, in September 1936. The King’s Scholars lived in a house of their own called College, and I looked forward to the experience. For the reality I turned out to be totally unprepared. I was a prig. I was ...”

“... Patterson displays no moral indignation towards religious intolerance.) This wasn’t the king’s preference, but it was the price he paid for a quiet life, for not having to go ‘on his travels again’. It also led to nearly every political crisis of the reign and ultimately to dependence on secret treaties that were none too secret and to Puritan ...”

“... Voltaire’s Zadig, and the authorities of Babylon in the mystery of the sacred horse of the king and the queen’s respectable dog. Clues, then, if they are to be fair, must fall within that area of common knowledge the validity of which a judge in court feels free to take into judicial notice: things so generally known to be true that evidence need not ...”

“... Roger Deakin has swum through England. Instead of a travelogue, he has written a waterlog, and instead of being waterlogged, he has moved around the country untrammelled, and often naked. In this seductive book he gives a rare and visionary account of what it means to feel an affinity with the lakes, springs, rivers, streams and seashores of these islands, instead of the motorways, car-parks and Little Chefs that blight the instincts of the traveller who is eager to commune with what is left of raw nature ...”

“... elsewhere, but the English monarchy has long liked to acquire pictures of artists. Charles I, a king much absorbed by how he was himself depicted, bought, commissioned or was given numerous artist portraits. The Commonwealth sold Charles’s collection, and although many of those pictures were reacquired by Charles II, a Dürer self-portrait, for ...”

“... including the who-is-sleeping-with-whom variety. Wilson called in the then head of MI5, Roger Hollis, and told him that MI5 would in future have to seek his personal approval before investigating any MP. Telephone-tapping, the interception of letters, the examining of bank accounts were specifically forbidden. And Wilson warned Hollis that he would ...”

“... contains few books which the undergraduates have read virtually to pulp. One is Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, published 95 years ago. Its pages are falling out and its binding has been worn to threads and cardboard. Clearly students told off to go and read Wittgenstein and George Eliot have been spending delicious secret hours enjoying Allan ...”

“... of the doubt involved here. But, as it happens, having carefully reconstructed the movements of Roger Windsor, the NUM’s chief turncoat, and of Mohammed Altaf Abbasi, the demi-monde’s chief bagman, Milne is able to state with complete forensic confidence thatIt is self-evident that the Libyan money, still in dollars in Lloyds Bank on 3 December and ...”

“... against the French army, with added vituperation against Napoleon and the collaborationist king of Bavaria. It seems that only ten copies had been sold when the incredulous Palm was arrested, hurriedly tried and repeatedly shot in a botched execution three weeks later. Even though the news of this judicial murder caused widespread revulsion, especially ...”