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“... Abbey’ as a ‘post-revolutionary’ work. Roe argues the poem is haunted by the spirit of John Thelwall, the radical orator who was extremely popular in the 1790s and to whom Roe’s book is dedicated. In 1798 Thelwall was living a few miles away from Tintern Abbey, having retired from political engagement after the wave of arrests which followed the ...”

“... This at least was the view of Mrs Humphry Ward. Early in 1889, hearing that ‘that scoundrel Salisbury’ (as the positivist Frederic Harrison called him) was weighing the advantages of enfranchising a small slice of propertied (and presumably Conservative) women, Ward teamed up with her old friend Louise Creighton to respond. Their ‘Appeal against ...”

“... for their sartorial shortcomings: Lord Rosebery was rebuked for dressing like an American and Lord Salisbury for attending the queen wearing the trousers of an Elder Brother of Trinity House (Salisbury had to apologise: he had been preoccupied by ‘some subject of less importance’). The monarchy started to celebrate ...”

“... pomp he sported a luxuriant beard, which made him look like another late 19th-century Tory, Lord Salisbury: jarringly and unsettlingly so, since Salisbury was Chamberlain’s rival and the proponent of an antithetical strain of conservatism, pessimistic, illiberal and anti-democratic. Now clean-shaven, Timothy is no longer ...”

“... Edward III in Stratford. It’s a rainbow copy of The Shakespeare Apocrypha, scribbled over by John Barton when he was at King’s, with blacklead for Shakespeare, green for Greene and, jokily, orange for Peele. This is the good thing about ‘Shall I die?’, that it drives you back to the ‘margins’ of the oeuvre. And what a play you find ...”

“... than the 11 full-plate pictures. These have been skilfully thematised by the designer Frances Salisbury (sub-contracted, presumably). The photography (by Phil Starling) is moody, artfully under-exposed and obliquely-angled. Cumulatively the illustrations suggest a cathedral quiet and nobility of mission, combined with beyond-the-cutting-edge ...”

“... Clearly, the latter, though they are one to whom everyone is keen to pretend to defer. When John Reid, the health secretary, was discussing his reasons for not wanting to ban smoking in public places, he said he ‘worried about the unanimity of middle-class health professionals’ on this issue, and wondered what other sources of pleasure were ...”

“... as particularly ‘cultivated’; it is a little naive to suggest that the fifth Marquess of Salisbury ‘could hardly be considered a politician’; and surely no one could describe Attlee’s clipped military moustache as ‘drooping’. These are small matters: but then it is a book, despite its broad dynastic themes, largely composed of small ...”

“... conception of the modern church leader – until real life played an unfair trick and produced Dr John Spong, the ultra-trendy Bishop of Newark, USA, thereby making satire almost impossible. Only John Betjeman and Barbara Pym stood gallantly with their fingers in the dyke upholding a vision of the dear old ecclesia ...”

“... accounts and facts on the ground became impossible to ignore. In the New York Times Harrison Salisbury published a series of reports that revealed significant civilian casualties from the US bombing of North Vietnam, refuting the technocratic myth of the ‘surgical strike’. Hersh began an effort to extend and reinforce ...”

“... his style. Cambridge added to the mix the sense of Britain’s manifest destiny entertained by Sir John Seeley and his followers and William Cunningham’s brand of Christian Conservatism. The discussion of Baldwin’s youth is professedly intended by Williamson to exhibit a ‘model of how examination of an interwar politician’s early life can genuinely and ...”

“... Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before and since, owes its popularity to the fact that ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ is still for many ...”

“... Fleamarsh had come in a few days before. Her husband had complained of chest pains on the train to Salisbury, missed the cathedral, collapsed on the bus, and died at Stonehenge. She insisted on having him cremated, so that she could carry him in her handbag. Is there a more presumptuous statement than ‘He would have wanted it this way?’ Accompanying his ...”

“... longer merely good subjects for painters: they were up-to-date models for the Christian life. When John Bale published the interrogations of the English martyr Anne Askew in 1547, he compared her sufferings and her courage, in detail, to those of Blandina, whose heroic death was described in the ancient Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius. As ...”

“... John Stuart Mill labelled the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’. They have certainly been stupid since 1997, and one wonders if their stupidity will persist. But a related and more interesting question is: ‘Are the Conservatives any longer a serious party?’ A serious party can be one of two things. It can, like the Greens, be concerned with only one issue or one group of issues ...”