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“... his youth. It is unlikely that he would have enjoyed its contents. Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Albert Victor was born in January 1859. He was a breech baby, whose delivery was mishandled by the attending physician so that the muscles of the shoulder, arm and hand were damaged. This was the origin of the ‘withered arm’. His mother Vicky was acutely aware of ...”

“... Abbey, erected soon after his death in 1377. Edward, the initiator of the Hundred Years War, the victor of Sluys and Crécy, the conqueror of Calais, achieved legendary status in his lifetime, and was long revered after his death. Dr Johnson, in his poem London, called on ‘illustrious Edward!’ to survey the current crop of degenerate Britons: ‘Lost in ...”

“... of soldiers in tight formation), dreamed up by the philosopher Charles Fourier and his disciple Victor Considerant as a solution to the social and economic instabilities of post-revolutionary France: a settlement house or estate for 1620 people organised around a street gallery that ran the full length of the second floor. This public thoroughfare was the ...”

“... process, the first portrayer of society in terms that Adam Smith might and Karl Marx did approve. David Brown makes the academic case admirably. He begins by modestly disclaiming originality: he is developing insights put forward by others in recent years, and only applying them more carefully to a selection of the major novels. This is a service which it ...”

“... apart from the dauphin and his supporters – were no longer the enemies of the English. The victor of Agincourt deserves to be considered a peace-maker as well as a warmonger. The ‘warrior-king’ tradition of both British and French historiography makes him an implacable enemy of the French, but later nationalistic preconceptions have obscured the ...”

“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective ...”

“... British children had been reduced. These memories were refreshed by reading Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s huge history of the country between 1945 and 1951. It is difficult for anyone familiar only with the shimmering prosperity of contemporary Western Europe to realise just what it was like in the years immediately after the Second World War. In ...”

“... commonplace had found a champion who could wear its colours with all the ceremony of greatness.’ David Skal’s new biography of Stoker follows his 2004 study, Hollywood Gothic, which managed to take Dracula on page, stage and screen seriously, but not too seriously. It becomes clear reading the Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ how difficult it is to ...”

“... after a visit to the Exposition Universelle, he expressed enthusiasm for British painting – for David Wilkie, Charles Robert Leslie and Francis Grant – and noted that the archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites (the ‘école sèche’) had not inhibited their response to life and sentiment: he cited the Order of Release by Millais as something beyond the ...”

“... Eighty-six people died in the Waco siege in April, including the ‘prophet’ David Koresh and 17 children fathered by him. David Leppard, a crime reporter with the Sunday Times Insight team who covered the Waco story, describes well and knowledgeably the appalling build-up of weapons in the compound of the Branch Davidians’ ranch and the information and assumptions that led the two law enforcement agencies involved – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI – to make a series of disastrous errors ...”

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

“... while omitting to mention that this was so largely from the point of view of the ruling classes: Victor Hugo, in his ‘Guerre aux démolisseurs’, attacked the obsession with the straight line by linking it directly to the oppressive exercise of state authority). The Emperor’s main objectives, however, were strictly practical: to make the city ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... have been wider than that dividing two nominal moderates. Frank Chapple of the Electricians and David Basnett of the G and M. Chapple began the tradition of heroic truculence, justifiable if unsubtle anti-Communism, double arm’s-length relations with the TUC General Council and aggressive modernisation. Basnett, an honest man inheriting a measure of ...”

“... of printed works, paintings and engravings. For instance, she makes much of the fact that while David’s great 1785 work The Oath of the Horatii features three brothers taking an oath in front of their father, a 1793 engraving depicting an oath-taking by three revolutionary soldiers shows no father, only a fallen comrade. The comparison perfectly ...”