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“... John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent ...”

“... it had been destroyed.As it turned out, however, there was much more to come. In the late 1970s, John Marks, a journalist who specialised in intelligence matters, filed a Freedom of Information request that uncovered a trove of 16,000 documents, most of which hadn’t been sent for shredding because they were filed as financial records. In the course of ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...”

“... personal danger, and even when times were good his reforming zeal was always constrained by the King’s theological conservatism. With Henry’s death, the close shaves were apparently over and Cranmer could at last begin to build a truly reformed Church under the new Josiah, Edward VI, with the aim, as MacCulloch repeatedly documents, of making England ...”

“... the 1960s on the last page of Campbell’s hard-eyed reconstruction of the legend, ‘and I am King of the Universe.’ When we met in England, Ginsberg had abdicated another impromptu throne, as King of the May (Kral Majales) in Prague. He had been expelled for taking off his clothes during a reading to his student ...”

“... girlhood’; in 1937 they were absorbed, both in London and Ottawa, in the preparations for King George VI’s coronation. Elizabeth – ‘all pink and white and golden’, as Ritchie remembered her – was much more enthusiastic than her sister Jane, an unimpressed aggressive girl who resented the flummery and chiefly remembered not having been able ...”

“... To a modern reader, this sounds like a cop-out, rather like Nahum Tate’s attempt to rewrite King Lear with a happy ending. Some of the ancient audience may have felt the same, though most might simply have savoured the irony, since they knew all along what the fate of Gilgamesh would be. Others might have reflected that it was better to be judged in the ...”

“... to its own fictiveness, and revealing itself as the deceitful handiwork of fabulists like the mad King Boris, who is heard stamping about overhead in one of Robbe-Grillet’s own earliest fictions. As the author of novels that wouldn’t dream of pretending to be other than fictional, Echenoz is heir to that progressive line of thought, even if, diffident ...”

“... parties (one composed, paradoxically, of ‘independents’), both swearing allegiance to King Hassan, and a tiny socialist party on the fringe of political life. Elsewhere in Africa you will find, without searching too hard, countries in which national liberation continues – long after it has been achieved – to provide the chief focus for ...”

“... would have been drawn to this nondescript patch of water by legends concerned with a divine king or a god. Here there is nothing, no legends, no history, no creative essences in the water that can cure sickness of body and mind. In India the pond would have been ringed by hucksters, half-naked holy men smeared with ashes, epileptics, sellers of fake ...”

“... form of prayer, invented in early medieval monasteries and much cultivated by the laity, like King Richard III, in the 15th century. Forman’s practice of this old-fashioned kind of prayer is the best guide we have to the kind of Christian he was. Not, by the exacting standards of the seminary priests of his time, any kind of Catholic, or he wouldn’t ...”

“... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...”

“... formidable ally with ample weapons stocks, which nursed a long-standing animosity, reciprocated by King Hassan II and his government, towards the largely pro-Western monarchy on its western border. East Timor and Western Sahara are post-colonial narratives in the proper sense; and how badly they read. General Franco’s death followed within a year and a half ...”

“... he opted for schemes that make us shudder today.’ At the same time as Coren’s assault, John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses branded Wells an inveterate despiser of the common man. All in all, 1992 was a bad year for the Wellsian cause. Coren’s book was dealt with in this paper by Patrick Parrinder (8 April 1993). Parenthetically ...”