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“... both safety and advantage. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments On 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon dioxide – the same protocol Al Gore as Vice-President had ...”

“... David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known each other 45 years and told each other thousands and thousands of anecdotes. And now, on two bars ...”

“... nose, and made up his eyes.’ This is the world that Vaslav Nijinsky entered as a young dancer in St Petersburg, a world, Acocella writes, ‘in which there was a heavy sexual trade in ballet dancers’. Yet Nijinsky was both involved in all this, and at the same time apart from it: he spent many of his evenings reading The Idiot by candlelight, nurturing his ...”

“... many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For while, in some ways, the British monarchy is constantly developing and evolving, in other respects it is remarkably consistent and unchanging, and one of its most unvarying features during the last three hundred years has been the miserable lot of ...”

“... to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a Neoclassical rotunda with an eagle-like phoenix raising its strong wings. Below the cupola ...”

“... of 1 December 1613 was one which involved three French ‘goldworkers’ resident in the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate, and a woman from Whitechapel called Frances Williams. The charge was fornication. Though not in itself unusual, the charge had an extra twist, repeated with minor variations in most of the entries relating to it: ‘they were all 4 ...”

“... from images of the War in its first years: black-out blinds, allotments, digging for victory,‘George Formby’s uke’, those wrought iron railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems ...”

“... bedbugs (an estimate, surely). Bedbugs were a major hazard. Not everyone could afford, like George III, to hire a man of the calibre of Andrew Cooke, of Holborn, ‘Bug Destroyer to His Majesty’, who had ‘cured 16,000 beds with great applause’. The author does not dwell too long on those Victorian horrors ...”

“... Andrew Lang​ was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire ...”

“... of the name of Monro; and he told the story so often that he got the nickname of Tiger Conran’. George Downie (Downey), who died in Bengal in 1808, may have been equally keen to share it: in Travels in India a Hundred Years Ago (1893) Thomas Twining told of meeting in about 1800 a ‘Captain O’Donald’ who claimed to be one of those present at Munro’s ...”

“... plantation growing Sea Island cotton (the most sought after and profitable strain of the crop) on St Simon’s Island, just off the coast – leaving them to be run by overseers. Butler is best known to historians for his tempestuous marriage to the British actress Fanny Kemble, whom he courted after seeing her perform in Philadelphia. They married in ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”

“... Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on snake-bites, poisons and their remedies – there is ...”

“... in strange fantasies to sustain the impression of intimacy with Austen that the novels create. George Saintsbury, who coined the term ‘Janeite’ in 1894, made a point of his readiness ‘to live with and to marry’ Elizabeth Bennet and serve as ‘a knight (or at least a squire) of the order of St Jane’. In ...”

“... Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was putting in the guest bedrooms at Chatsworth. ‘I wish he’d leave a copy in all the bedrooms,’ drawls ...”