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“... for all the question of why Gillray should have poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a smack at Pamela – was largely confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that ...”

“... shrouded corpse of Oliver Cromwell, dead on 3 September 1658, was disinterred from the east end of Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey and, along with the purported corpses of two other regicides, conveyed to Tyburn, where the three dead men were executed on 30 January 1661. Left hanging all day, the now re-dead bodies were decapitated and thrown ...”

“... he was 21, his father decamped to South Africa). His marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, one of his writer heroes, ended in 1857 after she absconded with the painter Henry Wallis. Meredith took sole custody of their four-year-old son, Arthur; Mary Ellen died in 1861. There are photographs of ...”

“... use of ritual disguises and blackened faces in attacks on deer-parks in the Kentish Weald during Henry VIII’s reign, but offers no comment on this manifestation of a phenomenon whose 18th-century form is familiar from the pages of E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters. In the course of an interesting account of some 16th-century riots at ...”

“... succeeded admirably in capturing the rich for religion and was put on the list of royal chaplains. Thomas Darling struggled manfully as a curate in the evil rookery of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London but ended up running a tiny, undemanding parish in the City, overshadowed by St Paul’s. Robert Peter, a brilliant Classics scholar at Cambridge, ‘achieved so ...”

“... his drinking bouts. Under the prosecutor’s eye he can be made to look like a less amiable Dylan Thomas. The merit of the stories and poems called in to excuse or justify such a life has also been questioned. D.H. Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both ...”

“... who has produced the strongest case against his brothers has spurned the mantle of revolutionary. Thomas McKeown has long argued on epidemiological grounds that modern medicine cannot claim much credit for the shift in mortality and morbidity in the Western world. Criticism of medicine which attempts to penetrate its vital organs has always come from ...”

“... that it was in / And was in what the place was’ is how a verbal sketch of a reclining figure by Henry Moore begins (A Man in My Position); and for a specimen of his tangled line in love-poetry one could hardly improve on a snippet from ‘Morning Song’ in The World’s Room (1974), where the loved one is treated to an especially problematical ...”

“... Charles Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely ...”

“... in the CSCE, agreeing to participate mainly in order to further the emerging détente with Moscow. Henry Kissinger could have played a starring role if he’d wanted to, but he worried that the Western Europeans’ obsession with human rights and freedom of movement would interfere with superpower détente, especially the delicate negotiations over nuclear ...”

“... of national prosperity. A ragged girl in a Midlands nail factory was interviewed by Richard Henry Horne. She did not, he reported, ‘know what a country dance is, was never at a dance in her life; never saw a dance; never heard of Harlequin and Columbine; has no idea what they are like.’ Horne, peculiarly, is recalling pantomime conventions that were ...”

“... and diplomatic tasks which confronted her. ‘The plain fact which cannot be obscured,’ Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, said in February 1938, ‘is that it is beyond the resources of this country to make proper provision in peace for the defence of the British Empire against three major powers in three different ...”

“... to erase a memory. They were made in the early years of the Protestant Reformation; in 1535 Henry VIII demanded that his subjects strike out all references to the pope in their prayer books. This was book damage not as transgression but as legal prescription. ‘All manner [of] … books … wherein the said Bishop of Rome is named … [are] utterly to ...”

“... theory of history similar to that of Vico and taken over by Matthew Arnold from his father Thomas: the fifth century BC, when Greek religion was challenged by the Greek enlightenment, was often held to correspond with the period when the modern Enlightenment was challenging Christianity. The third method depended upon Comte’s theory of the three ...”

“... of giving us the sum of his wisdom. Philip Toynbee revered that extremely articulate Trappist, Thomas Merton, but soon got fed up with his nimble sentences in praise of Love, presenting it, placing it, and saying all it can do. Can it? Toynbee says he prefers to try not to use the word at all. He has many facetious moments, though the facetiousness does ...”