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“... of Crécy in 1346. The slightly longer answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the ...”

“... you,’ he said, ‘when it fires it’s as if a horse has kicked you back from the grave.’ Robin Robertson, the poet and editor, was born with a heart in which one of the valves – the aortic valve – was composed of only two cusps instead of the usual three. The aortic valve prevents backflow from the aorta into the principal ventricle of the ...”

“... has sunk so catastrophically over the past five years is the electronic efficiency of libraries in cross-cataloguing and inter-library loan. A battle is looming between the publishing and library industries. Having been extorted for some ten million volumes over the years publishers will look very coldly on the BL’s begging bowl. And, quite rightly, they ...”

“... as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the generic figure ...”

“... switched, at the height of his career, to an instrument made in Paris by Raoux. In this act of cross-fertilisation, he anticipated Dennis Brain – perhaps the greatest player of our century – who in mid-career abandoned the narrow-bore Raoux horn on which he had been trained to take up a German instrument.The historical part of Barry Tuckwell’s book ...”

“... black hair bobbed short, a thin, determined little mouth’. When she was a baby, her big brother Robin was murdered, hanged from the tree in the front yard on Mother’s Day. The culprit has never been found. It’s a bizarre crime: this is not how children get killed. But the details of his death are unimportant; what matters is the fact of it. The effect ...”

“... records the happy exhortation: ‘Let us unite in Christ’s Faith and the victory of the Holy Cross, for, God willing, today we shall all be made rich.’ (Some were, though one feels that most were not.) The Crusading generals quarrelled interminably and destructively among themselves, with results that nearly scuppered the First Crusade and did scupper ...”

“... naturalists’ when it was exhibited at Windsor.) There were also some alarming attempts at cross-breeding. In 1773, Lord Robert Clive was determined that his zebra mare should mate with an ass. The zebra ‘shewed great disgust’ but Clive persevered: the ass was painted with stripes, ‘whereupon she accepted him’. (The mule that resulted from this ...”

“... mid-Fifties I was present at a similar explosion of black humour. In the company of a girl called Robin Banks I visited the Magrittes, who had quite recently moved to the Rue des Mimosas – an indication that at last René was beginning to prosper. Perhaps because Robin was very pretty, perhaps because Magritte was amused ...”

“... Robin Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other words, don’t just write for the trade ...”

“... allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is ...”

“... Like relics of the True Cross, there are said to be enough splinters to make an orchard from the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare in his garden at New Place. The Shakespeare canon has excited nearly as much passion for tangible facts, however marginal to the true faith, as Holy Writ. Bits of venerated mulberry scattered around the world of believers are a salutary reminder that our passion for tangibility evokes more than just that irritable reaching after fact and reason that Keats declared to be the antithesis of Shakespeare ...”

“... holed up in mountain, bog and forest, some Irish Tories were rumoured to be popular champions or Robin Hood figures, genteel Catholic Jacobites who had squandered or forfeited their estates and now robbed the rich to give to the poor. Most of them, however, made do more modestly with simply robbing the rich. Like many an Irish dissident, they had no ardent ...”

“... have disturbed one who had turned out to see a live major-general hacked to pieces at Charing Cross. Baiting, Hahn says, went on ‘for some time’ before being criminalised. In fact it was still flourishing when Queen Victoria came to the throne. The bullards of Stamford, in Lincolnshire, defied an Act of 1835 banning the practice, and it was stopped ...”

“... hairdressers, on the BNP. ‘Fucking Pakis,’ one of the Yobs says. It is 11 September 2003. I cross the road and ask a policeman where to go for the press briefing. He points in the direction of a checkpoint set up by al-Muhajiroun. Al-Muhajiroun are holding a conference to commemorate the 19 mujahideen who gave their lives for the cause of jihad. I am ...”