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“... joy of reading the letter’ containing what Julian called ‘great news’: he was sleeping with Anthony Blunt – his ‘first love affair’. She realised then that he ‘meant to tell me things. I had never expected it.’ After Blunt Julian’s affairs were heterosexual, but there were quite a few of them, they often ran concurrently and he provided a ...”

“... worked to free black slaves in England who had been brought back from the Caribbean by their masters. These efforts culminated in the Somerset decision of 1772, a legal circumlocution which may not actually have ended slavery but which persuaded a good many people – planters included – that it had done. During the Revolution itself, the loyal British ...”

“... is the only lawful means to make them fathers and mothers. It is the ordinary means to make them masters and mistresses.’ So whose weddings were they? Did rites of passage belong to the priests, who might follow the Prayer Book, canon law or their own liturgical inclinations, or did they belong to families and communities, who paid the clerical piper and ...”

“... itself, of the adaptation by Christopher Hampton, and of the charismatic central performance by Anthony Sher – and partly due to the blushes of self-congratulation that suffuse the BBC when it oversteps its own maidenly limits in matters sexual and political. More than all this, Bradbury has written books of academic literary criticism. A brief canter ...”

“... gathered not only from books but from countless conversations with Balkan people and their masters in peace and war, his politics were elusive. A Bulgarian friend asked how he could possibly want to visit Romania, after it had stolen the Dobrudja from Bulgaria and seized Transylvania from Hungary. Leigh Fermor retorted that he wasn’t a political ...”

“... illuminate the figure we’re after for just long enough. You have probably never heard of Anthony Scoloker, or Ursyn Mylner, or John Gybkin or Lodowick Harbard, but Blayney reveals probably as much as it is humanly possible to know of their teeming world. When John Warwick died in York in 1542, his inventory listed not only one cow and six silver ...”

“... years by a percentage point a year. Real incomes also are falling. Except, again, at the top. Anthony O’Reilly, chairman, president and chief executive of H.J. Heinz, received $75,085,000 in 1991, about $300,000 every working day, $37,500 every working hour. He was, it’s true, the best rewarded of the ten executives who received more than $11 million ...”

“... carry the People in their rucksacks. Primus inter people is the founding director of Charter 88, Anthony Barnett, whose book attempts to recapture for his constitutionalist tendency the drama of ‘our constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have changed, especially ...”

“... to achieve or to represent. Ariosto and Aristotle and the Pope and the Estense were too many masters for Tasso. Only endemic poetic and emotional irresolution made it possible for him to serve all those lords at once. The liberata is great because of its recognition of, and response to, that irresolution. It also makes it hard to translate. Tasso’s ...”

“... by slipping through Duveen’s gargantuan legs rather than by standing up to him. The next guest, Anthony Caro, took Duveen on. But Caro is an artist whose rich creativeness is not matched by his critical intelligence, and this has never been more evident than it was in his contest with Duveen. He appears in his naivety to have made two strategic errors: to ...”

“... draws principally on writers of adventure books such as A.E.W. Mason (The Four Feathers) and Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda). The Flashman yarns, however, are recurrently subversive. Take the episode in Flashman in the Great Game in which Harry, to escape massacre by Indian mutineers, disguises himself as a sepoy. There is a mêlée, he is knocked ...”

“... the courts. While ‘comming out of the church’ in Hunstanworth (Co. Durham), Roger Doon denied Anthony Ratcliff’s accusation that he was a thief. ‘Although ye be a gent., and I a poore man, my honestye shalbe as good as yours.’ Ratcliff was horrified: ‘What saith thou? Liknes thou thy honestye to myn?’ He ‘lyftyd up his hand at Doon’, but ...”

“... deduce that Ezra Pound, let alone William Carlos Williams, had ever existed. Who now are the Old Masters? Larkin, of course; early Auden; Hardy; Tennyson; Thomas Hood (in a certain quarter); Byron and Shelley at their most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely ...”

“... Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan ...”

“... clear-eyed brutes alike. The Magnificent Five, who in the Forties and early Fifties provided their masters with vast quantities of material, lived to see the KGB dilute the intelligence their thousands of foreign agents pumped back with massive draughts of ideological mush; and those of them who defected to Moscow actually helped them to do ...”