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“... with an adjective: ‘sinister’ and ‘Machiavellian’ used to be two of the most common. As Geoffrey Elton wrote in 1953, ‘We do not call a man sinister whom we know well, whether we like him or not.’ But Elton merely restates the problem. How do we get to know Thomas Cromwell in the first place? The answer is by a painstaking forensic recovery of ...”

“... opportunist, some earnest and candid about being incomplete. The biographies by Graham McCann and Geoffrey Wansell, both published in 1996, were steps in the right direction. There are memoirs, like Maureen Donaldson’s An Affair to Remember (1989); or Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant (2011) by Dyan Cannon, his fourth wife and the mother of his only ...”

“... to live on his clerical stipend at the beginning of the 1920s, his father maintained ‘the household staff of a gardener and two maids that he felt a man in his position required’. For his son, public school, at Sherborne, was followed by four years reading, or more often not reading, classics at Oxford from 1923 to 1927. Friendships formed at Oxford ...”

“... employed in spinning, and their earnings accounted, in many cases, for more than a third of their household income. When new technology put them out of work, these families suffered. But spinning was an extreme case. One study of the linen industry in 1860 suggested that while mechanisation improved productivity in spinning by a factor of 320, it only ...”

“... later settled near Oxford. Their two boys (Frank 1920, Edward 1924) were born into a comfortable household where the dying embers of Christianity were revived as art and duty, or poetry and truth as their father might have put it. Both children felt called to poetry and Edward Jr was a lifelong admirer of Blake, campaigning in his last years for a ...”

“... them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent series of ...”

“... the ongoing struggle within the security establishment over the protocols of machismo.) Geoffrey Miller, the man who made ‘Gitmoize’ a household word, relieves a general at Guantanamo for being too ‘soft – too worried about the prisoners’ well-being’. Both the FBI and the CIA finally decide to pull out ...”

“... in the book has a through-line, it is the battle of his ‘I’ with his ‘want’. Father Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The ...”

“... love a citizen woman, just as no Roman comedy would represent the manoeuvres which go on inside a household.’ Not only does Shakespeare’s play allow the audience to enter the once forbidden domestic space, but it draws much of its humour from challenges to the prerogatives of rank and gender that would have seemed unthinkable to the authors of Roman New ...”

“... ingredients were a permutation of salt, alum, fish-fat and urine. Pissing in the Henley Street household was an active contribution to the family business, and one may be tempted to think this some kind of prototype for the profitable fluency of the poet’s ink. Through Shakespeare’s childhood his father served the Stratford corporation in roles of ...”

“... political Humanism. The notion of a ‘Tudor despotism’ has suffered formidable blows from Sir Geoffrey Elton, who believes the rule of law to have prevailed in Henry’s reign – or at least in the period of Thomas Cromwell’s supremacy. He regards the treason legislation of the period as not an extension but a codification of existing law, which gave ...”

“... economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove; the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and file he was so eager to use; the microscope, the magnet, the little globe, and every trinket ...”

“... of anything morbid in myself … It was with a specific fear & a specific complaint that I went to Geoffrey [Thompson, a shrink], then to Bion [Wilfred, also a shrink] to learn that the ‘specific fear & complaint’ was the least important symptom of a diseased condition that began in a time which I could not remember, in my ‘pre-history’. In other ...”

“... me … I should like to inject a little Bang, or Hasheesh, or whatever the Malays use, into him [Geoffrey Faber] just to see him run howling down the street with flaming eyes like a Malay amok. I don’t think I say this in malice. There is no one I like better.’ A month later: ‘It would make me rather lonely to think you were quite flawless … I should ...”