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“... the first place. It is the facetiousness that annoys. Is John Pilger really so dreadful? Can the Stephen Waldorf affair be taken lightly? Does Johnson have to talk about Greenham women as if he were an agent of Lord Gnome? The British Library will catalogue him under ‘Anecdotes, facetiae, satire etc’ – which is fine. But he should allow himself the ...”

“... and obscenities will have to wait for Caro to finish – if they live long enough. Well before Stephen Ambrose got blindsided a few months ago by the plagiarism police, he produced solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter ...”

“... and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of foundations ...”

“... in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of their apprentices, Stephen Belott. Some years later Belott sued Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £60, and Shakespeare was among those called to give evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. He did so on 11 May 1612, though – somewhat conveniently for Mountjoy – he ...”

“... efficient, consumer-friendly industry. In his 1978 party report on the nationalised industries, Nicholas Ridley had deplored the fact that certain unions could hold the Government to ransom by striking or threatening to strike. The outstanding example, of course, was Heath’s acceptance in 1974 of a 35 per cent pay increase for the miners after their ...”

“... skill with Leibniz, the astronomers Johannes Hevelius and John Flamsteed, the cartographer Nicholas Mercator and, most disastrously, with Newton, who, Hooke claimed, had plagiarised from him the inverse-square law of gravitation. If you crossed Hooke’s interests, you were in for some of the ripest abuse going: his enemies were, variously, ‘ignorant ...”

“... combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not sure if we drove to Green 5 – the streets were getting quieter.’ The patrol was about forty kilometres from Camp Abu Naji and the vehicles trundled along a dimly lit ...”

“... in 1607, failed to secure the issue of a writ of habeas corpus. The argument from principle of Nicholas Fuller, one of the radical lawyers of his day, not only failed to convince a majority of the five judges that there was an overriding privilege against self-incrimination, but also resulted in his being prosecuted and jailed for his arguments by the High ...”

“... character. Bogart made another fine film in that period: In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray, opposite Gloria Grahame (Bacall had wanted the role). It’s the story of an embittered screenwriter who has a violent, if not murderous, edge. No other film used Bogart’s hostility or self-loathing so well. The loneliness must have been spurred ...”

“... Erasmus’s edition of the New Testament, which made the Greek text available in print for the first time, is remembered as his most important achievement. This is partly because his profound influence in another sphere, that of education and Christian piety, became virtually invisible by its general absorption into the mainstream of European thought: the presence of his Adagia throughout the works of Shakespeare is an example ...”

“... and nuances of life itself; his galaxy is a constant flow of words that drift towards nullity. ‘Stephen King once called me a terrible writer,’ he says in his memoir, which is quite unjust. He’s not merely a terrible writer, he’s the terrible writer’s terrible writer, a distinction he should enjoy.Or possibly not. He mentions the Nobel Prize for ...”

“... best legitimate heir. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, openly and precisely said that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards. Mary’s remarkable initial success came from single-mindedly stressing the one asset she possessed: bastard or no bastard, she was flesh of Henry VIII’s flesh. What she did ...”

“... Several essays emphasise Fisher’s career as an outstanding scholar. An important paper by Stephen Thompson shows that he was also a model bishop, residing in his diocese, preaching, ordaining priests in person, generous in his charitable giving. Henry Chadwick offers a sketch of the royal supremacy that Fisher was combating, but discusses it as a ...”

“... no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings ... At its ...”

“... the poetry; when she does, it is conditional analysis, done with care. There is a prose account in Nicholas Sander’s gleefully slanderous The Origins and Progress of an Anglican Schism, published in 1585, a text which suggests that Anne Boleyn was Henry’s own daughter. It also states that on seeing Henry prepare for marriage Wyatt panicked at the thought ...”