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“... Chatterton could ‘do’ any poet from Chaucer to the recently dead Charles Churchill; and after his own death poets ‘did’ him. This stanza from ‘Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin’, is a blend of the Spenserian antique and ballad poetry, a combination which uses phrases that are heard again in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: How dydd I know thatt ev’ry darte Thatt cutte the airie waie Mighte nott fynde a passage to my harte And close myne eyes for aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton ...”

“... architect and one of its greatest natural philosophers, experimented with everything: stone and wood, cones and domes, animals and men. He liked to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling challenge ...”

“... his collection in 1827. Grant arrived in London that year from Edinburgh, where he had taught Charles Darwin and studied marine invertebrates with him in the Firth of Forth. All 12 of Grant’s brothers joined the navy or worked for the East India Company; he stayed closer to home, becoming a founding professor of the University of London, and the first ...”

“... in the park. In London and Paris, the illustrations that painters admired – some reproduced by wood engraving, some by lithography – were done by others. In America the illustrators themselves became painters and printmakers. While many of the prints here are evidence of the desire to make something of the American scene – the skyscrapers, bridges and ...”

“... Pushkin’s various notes are not fully reproduced in D.M. Thomas’s new translation, nor in Sir Charles Johnston’s of 1981). But ambiguity has always surrounded the statue, along with its imperial subject. The city which stood for a modernised and liberalised Russia was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in the building, and the intended ...”

“... design-history mode. Above him to the left is a copy of van Dyck’s triple portrait of Charles I. Baker took this copy to Rome for Bernini to model a sculpture on: the picture was supposed to be in hand at the time Mr Baker’s abundant curls were being carved. Surrounded by contemporary ephemera the sculpture’s timelessness is a little ...”

“... the depleted printers ‘could gett no better’. Fascinated with Roman remains, Aubrey took Charles II to see Avebury in 1663 after discovering the stones while hunting with aristocratic friends; he commissioned drawings of the 12th-century Osney Abbey before it was demolished. Like all busy people, he worked all the time, and felt he wasn’t working ...”

“... in several of her many lands. After observing the ravages of the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict which aimed to ensure that his (as yet unborn) children – even his daughters – would stand in line to inherit his kingdoms. He assumed he would have at least one male heir. In 1716, his wife, Elisabeth ...”

“... should not be taken to suggest any idea of shortness. Fludd’s writings, said Anthony à Wood, sounding rather daunted, ‘were great, many and mystical’. His magnum opus was the Utriusque Cosmi Historia, which offered nothing less than a ‘technical, physical and metaphysical history of the macrocosm and the microcosm’. This appeared in parts ...”

“... Confronted with kings called Charles the Bald, Charles the Simple, Charles the Fat and Louis the Blind, and chroniclers like Notker the Stammerer, Benzo of Alba and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, we might be tempted to think that the history of France and Germany a millennium ago can offer us nothing more than the dreary spectacle of one barbarian succeeding another on the banks of the Seine or the Rhine ...”

“... his brother’s radicalism. Basil and his German wife, Katharina, have two children, Griselda and Charles. Around the Wellwoods circles a busy group of writers, radical academics, freethinkers, theatre directors and potters. Philip Warren joins this fortunate circle by chance: he is discovered in the basement of the South Kensington Museum, where he has been ...”

“... it seems, to deliver a working civilisation, a social wonder of the new world, to his sovereign Charles V, and to become himself the effective ruler of the Mexica and indeed all the Indians of Central America. He lost a lot of the treasure he had gathered, and he conquered a ruin; but he ended a world, or consigned that world to the devious and subterranean ...”

“... be writing along with Godard when he asks Anne-Marie Miéville to read the following phrases from Charles Péguy’s Clio, evoked for us by Daniel Fairfax and subtitled ‘dialogue between history and the pagan soul’: I need a day to write the history of a second. I need a year to write the history of a minute. I need a lifetime to write the history of an ...”

“... in the children’s weeklies. The person chiefly responsible for the new note of jollity was Charles Hamilton, better known as Frank Richards, who made a Never Never Land of the English public school, but did it with such dash, amiability and authority that every subsequent generation, right up to the present, has contained its quota of Greyfriars ...”

“... Dick’ on whom we were brought up. He fought back vigorously against his opponents, and, like Charles in 1641, was prepared to turn to support from Scotland and Ireland to keep power against his enemies. The fact that, unlike Charles I, he soon realised that the logistical difficulties were too great seems to ...”