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“... before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there. In 1553, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the ...”

“... him to advertise for leads in a London newspaper. This Elizabeth, it seems, was someone else. More important than the biographical red herrings are the enduring assumptions that flow from Pope’s infamous lines. Haywood’s erotic novels of the 1720s were noisily disparaged by canonical pioneers of the genre such as Samuel Richardson (though Richardson ...”

“... highly regarded, through whose hands they have passed, and so on. In all this I see nothing of more than mediocre intelligence, and I suspect there exists some degree of servility in this enthusiasm. Dare I say what I think of this debauchery and corrupt curiosité? One must somehow enjoy a swindle so to apply one’s mind to studying pictures. It could ...”

“... largest earthquake to strike Japan since 1923. During the twenty seconds of shaking that followed, more than five thousand people died, tens of thousands were injured and three hundred thousand were made homeless. At least £100 billion of damage was caused. Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most popular living novelist, whose parents’ house was destroyed in the ...”

“... around the ironist?’ Braithwaite asks. It’s a rhetorical question, with – ironically – more facets than the man who asks it realises. The novel’s title has many, proliferating referents, but not the least of them is its narrator: Braithwaite himself is Flaubert’s parrot, not only because he’s always quoting him but also because he is living ...”

“... died every day for 1458 days. And like the First World War, the Civil War got bloodier and more destructive as it ground inconclusively on. Five of its six costliest battles, with casualties in the tens of thousands on each side, took place after April 1863, roughly the war’s midpoint. It ended, as the Second World War ended, in an epic struggle for ...”

“... Against the ruins of love and idealism, Alice Thomas Ellis shores up the fragmentary consolations of art. Her books are beautifully fashioned, tailored, cut from superior cloth: you’re aware of the chunks from the fabric of experience that she has rejected, and her characters know just enough of the outside world not to be able to make sense of themselves ...”

“... Some of its contributors are Marxists, feminists and postmodern philosophers. Could anything be more at odds with the no-nonsense common sense of the ordinary man or woman? We have become so accustomed to this usage that it is something of a shock to be reminded by Sophia Rosenfeld that ‘common sense’ once had a very different set of political ...”

“... is closed. The window’s closed and the air-conditioning is on, the dashboard isn’t dusty any more, and the taste of mint gum is in her mouth. In fact the gum is there, she has gum in her mouth right now. She pushes it out with her tongue and it falls into her lap. What’s remarkable is that in the first ten pages of his novel, Lennon has provided such ...”

“... attention to a remarkable paradox: that at a time when medical knowledge is greater and technology more powerful than ever before, medicine is assailed by doubts about its role and purpose. Some reasons for the doubts are clear enough: uncertainty about the respective responsibilities of public and private agencies for the finance and administration of health ...”

“... Neither Vidal nor Howard Auster, his long-standing companion, swam in the pool, which was even more impressively blue than the sea at the foot of the cliff. Sunshine, cypresses, cicadas, scented air, the physical drama: all the sense-heightening Mediterranean stuff. Kurt Vonnegut, a house guest, had disappeared: his photographer wife, Jill ...”

“... Thomas Becket​ was not the first archbishop of Canterbury to meet a violent end – Archbishop Alphege was killed by Vikings in 1012 – but he was unique in other ways. Unlike his predecessors, he was not particularly learned and wrote nothing except letters (the 12th-century equivalent of texting), of which 189 survive ...”

“... in Continental Europe during the Second World War and the years leading up to it. His heroes are more likely to be journalists, film producers or novelists than professional spies or rugged military types, though the protagonist of Dark Voyage (2004) is a fairly rugged merchant seaman. The hero of The Polish Officer (1995) is, as the title hints, an officer ...”

“... one might add, for subsequent promotion (to professor, endowed chair, or president of the MLA) more full-length books will be required. Under this regime the academic profession (Humanities Branch, Literature Subdivision) has become a monograph-producing industry. This, it would seem, is not something Greenblatt has a problem with in principle. Others ...”

“... The bicentennial of 2019 celebrated the arrival of the city-state’s ‘founding father’, Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, whose name graces countless schools and institutions, the famous hotel, and the world’s largest flower. ‘Without 1819, we may never have been launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today,’ the prime minister, Lee ...”