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“... that the monarchy is, and has been for more than a century, politically impotent and irrelevant. Simon Heffer and the late Robert Rhodes James have thought differently, and rightly so. Recent indignation over the ‘co-option’ of royal events by Tony Blair highlights the uses to which politicians can put the monarchy; it ...”

“... inutilis. After his dismal performance at the battle of Saintes in 1242, his bitterest enemy, Simon de Montfort, said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry was also affectionate by ...”

“... to present them in as favourable a light as possible. From this point of view, the diary of Robert Kilroy-Silk is a great disappointment.1 Before embarking on its exploration the reader ought to prepare himself for two shocks. First, there are yet more disclosures about the operations of Militant in Merseyside. In his new book on Labour’s future Eric ...”

“... both Philby and Burgess, was recalled to Moscow and shot. During the three-year period covered by Robert Conquest in Inside Stalin’s Secret Police the NKVD leadership was twice liquidated. Nikolai Yezhov, who succeeded G.G. Yagoda as head of the NKVD in September 1936, purged most of Yagoda’s men in the spring of 1937 (though Yagoda himself was not shot ...”

“... about its anxieties, distortions and deformations, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, which until the mid-1980s every trade unionist, Labour Party member and left-leaning student in Britain could safely be said to have read, or at least heard of. Then in 1984 everyone put it down and picked up Money. For the benefit of anyone too ...”

“... reported that passing aircraft could interfere with radio reception. Less than a year later, Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated by a simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain ...”

“... the fancy of generations of historians. There was one notable exception among the scholars: Robert Tucker put a dashing young revolutionary – someone who might have stepped out of the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Weathermen – on the cover of Stalin as Revolutionary (1973). But the ‘grey blur’ remained, no doubt partly in reaction against ...”

“... for a few months in 1918 in a job far from danger, but even then got sick and was, according to Simon Ball, ‘forced’ back to London. Unsurprisingly, what counted for the men of this generation was how a person had behaved in the war. Macmillan, taxed in 1961 for his ‘unflappability’, replied: ‘I learned that in early youth under fire on the ...”

“... Simon Starling’s film installation Phantom Ride, commissioned by Tate Britain for its vast Duveen Galleries, takes its title from a cinematic fad of the early 1900s. Cameras and cameramen were hitched to the buffers of trains, and latterly trams, and filmed the track and scenery as they hurtled along. An early phantom ride was typically a single shot, just a few minutes long, which might, if you visited Hale’s Tours of the World (established on Oxford Street in 1906), have had its speeding colonial vistas enhanced with railway whistles, hissing steam and even shaking benches ...”

“... In English, ‘favourite’ was distanced, but only by a margin, from the French mignon. Sir Robert Naunton famously insisted that Elizabeth I’s ministers were ‘only favourites, not minions’. Was her first minister for much of the reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, such a favourite? In this volume, Paul Hammer distinguishes his position from that ...”

“... everyone was sympathetic to forms of woe – especially to deformities. In Cruelty and Laughter, Simon Dickie mounts a compelling case against what he calls ‘the politeness-sensibility paradigm’, by resurrecting a jeering counter-discourse that revelled in human suffering and physical affliction. His point about the sentimental 18th century is partly a ...”

“... the snooker, Martin?’ ‘Not really.’ ‘No? Fair enough.’ Or: ‘Alright, Mossy,’ Simon says. ‘How are you? Alright?’ Mossy says something. ‘Yeah alright,’ Simon says. The whole of Spring can be summarised as James’s effort to find out whether he is ‘okay’ – the word flickers through the ...”

“... for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that could drive anthologies ...”

“... smaller walls. Walls not necessarily much more extensive than those the Pissarros lived within. Simon Shorvoan’s essay in the catalogue describing their lives in England is a vignette of Bedford Park bohemia, of dedication to an artistic life in which poverty was an accepted condition. The dilapidated 18th-century cottage, The Brook, which Lucien and ...”

“... they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ‘is intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to ...”