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“... of the princes in the Tower though they avoided the smothering pillow. Stories, too, of the Parker Bowles family – providers of sexual services to the Crown. Brown tells Andrew Parker Bowles that she doesn’t hunt and doesn’t fish: ‘“Real intellectual, are you?” he said with a slight patrician sneer.’ One ...”

“... to the important collections of essays edited by J.S. Cockburn (Crime in England, 1550-1750), by John Brewer and John Styles (An Ungovernable People?) and by V.A. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (Crime and the Law); to the implications of the work of Peter Laslett; and above all to the ...”

“... theories of natural law and natural rights and which centred on the political thought of John Locke. Here his arguments have encountered strong resistance, though the battle between the two positions can be unreal. James Tully’s essay tactfully demonstrates how often republican and Lockean languages complemented, rather than competed with, each ...”

“... work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to explain how he got ...”

“... producers were Barry Levinson and his partner, Mark Johnson. We had first met when Levinson, Alan Parker and I had dinner in London. It was a wonderfully smug affair: the last three films we had directed, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons, had between them received 23 Oscar nominations. Levinson himself was to have made Donnie Brasco but ...”

“... desert, mistaken by me for the Nevadan ... we seem to have reached Nevada after all ... my Parker 51 ink is checked in my grip for Chicago.’ By the time Forster is 84 and writing that ‘I seem to be losing everything today and knocking most things over – the milk has just gone onto the poems of George Herbert,’ we may feel we’ve been rummaging ...”

“... At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one double-take. In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Mary Crawford is rattling ...”

“... are catalogued in The Road to Wellville (1993), a novel about the cereal manufacturer Dr John Harvey Kellogg – inventor, in Boyle’s phrase, of ‘gastrically correct foods’. He makes surreal play of Kellogg’s determination to force his guests at the Battle Creek Sanitarium to eat his nutritional products: ‘Nut Lisbon Steak, Protose ...”

“... jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to ...”

“... with some interesting annotations. These annotations, I can now reveal, are in the hand of Sir John Puckering, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. This is a new fact, though not a surprising one. Puckering took a particular interest in what we might today call ‘state security’, and together with another high-ranking court official and Privy ...”

“... as anything else about him. (The idea was already becoming familiar in the performing world, where John Barrymore, notably, had played out the end of his career surrounded by idiot-boards as an openly bog-eyed parody of his younger self.) It was in the Fifties, then, that America’s taste-makers finally stopped resisting the attractions of dissolution and ...”

“... All suicide, we are to believe, is painful, messy, undignified and inconvenient. Or as Dorothy Parker (an inveterate botcher of suicide) put it: Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. Britain’s policy of benign censorship keeps the annual ...”

“... But if the obsequies are awkward, ‘a good death’ in the 17th-century sense, like John Evelyn’s touching description at his mother’s bedside in 1635 – now that is really difficult. One name is common to Rosemary Dinnage’s thanatological anthology of personal views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph ...”