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“... after all, interesting in their own right. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of ...”

“... of servants’ (Genesis 9. 25). After the defeat of an Italian army at Adowa in 1896 by the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, the only African country to withstand the Scramble, the term took on a powerful political dimension. Ethiopian movements played a part in such political insurgency as the Bambata rebellion of 1906 and ...”

“... too. Certainly Jews and Catholics faced a common threat, for if Jews were believed to have any Christian credentials, those credentials were Catholic ones. The small and secret Jewish community, whose existence was revealed to the public by Menasseh ben Israel’s campaign, worshipped at the Spanish Embassy – and in 1655 England and Spain were at ...”

“... to us but which were nothing to be ashamed of in the 1780s and 90s – gluttony, for instance. John Beresford, who edited the Diary just after the First World War, sees it all quite differently, and his Introduction and Notes are a period piece in themselves. For Beresford, the Norfolk parson was ‘that very rare and beautiful bird – a typical ...”

“... generally assume that he wrote the poem for a learned community familiar with classical and Christian literature, a degree of sophistication more easily found in an 11th-century monastery than at a Norman court. But the story reads like a fable; it’s full of the bears, dogs, horses and donkeys that populate Aesop’s tales. It’s possible that its ...”

“... on it in gold thread, and accompanied by a crowd of Jewish supporters. Egidio was a learned Christian cabbalist and preacher who called for a world conqueror to defeat the Turk and usher in a golden age, and as Miriam Eliav-Feldon has pointed out, the cardinal’s eschatological excitement made him respond eagerly to Reuveni’s claims.† When the ...”

“... Welles to record an immediate response. Welles was the original activist-actor, the precursor of John Wayne and Jane Fonda, if not Ronald Reagan. Hoping to reclaim the prodigal for the theatre, the Broadway producer Billy Rose addressed an open letter to him: ‘Listen, Thunder-in-the-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re ...”

“... A rich​ old American in John Banville’s new novel makes an amused distinction between money and small change. Asked what money is, he just laughs. This is not malevolent laughter but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first ...”

“... Donne’s powers are, for John Carey, a matter of power, the poems being ‘the most enduring exhibition of the will to power the English Renaissance produced’. The praises of Donne in this critical work of amazing flair and obduracy are single-minded: Donne is here valued, supremely, for the power and tenacity of his ego, for his imaginative energy, for his desire to dominate or his rage for supremacy, and for the obsession with which he registered the contrarieties and contradictions of life ‘in all their urgent discord ...”

“... with Memoirs from the Declaration of the War with Spain’, begun in 1746, now first published by John Brooke as an appendix to his edition. The title is misleading, for these are annals of the Hanoverian accession, and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his ...”

“... to a wider public, and in this respect can be seen at its best in a lucid account by its director, John Sutton, of many-handed research over the past twenty years in the vast region which lies between the Indian Ocean and the eastern periphery of the Congo Basin. What has been here at stake is partly the history of the coast and offshore islands, and partly ...”

“... There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April ...”

“... death, minority but important voices declare that they don’t care for shows. In 1661 John Evelyn noted that ‘the old plays’ like Hamlet were starting ‘to disgust this refined age’, and a decade later Dryden felt that the play smelled ‘a little too strongly of the buskin’ – the archaic theatrical boot. These are English Restoration ...”

“... is after the crucifixion, when she stands at the foot of the cross with the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, and then goes to the tomb with embalming oils to care for Jesus’s body. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke there are several women involved, and they find the tomb empty except for an angel (sometimes two), with ‘a face like ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill ...”