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“... present. ‘Unbelievably,’ he says of the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell’s killing of John D’Esterre (in a duel that set Catholic against Protestant), ‘O’Connell faced no legal proceedings at all over this act, while his standing among his followers was enhanced.’Rather than spoiling his book, this authorial stance galvanises readers to ...”

“... England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would have ...”

“... III’s summer visits were turning Weymouth into a fashionable resort, and he was schooled in Surrey until the money ran out when he was 12. A dedicated autodidact for the rest of his life (Peacock’s death in 1866 was reportedly hastened, if only by shock, when he refused to abandon his library during a house fire), he made sporadic attempts at the ...”

“... separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of ...”

“... Five such charitable institutions were created around mid-century: Earlswood near Redhill in Surrey, and the Eastern, Western, Northern and Midland Counties Asylums. The herding together of huge populations of problem people in turn prompted the framing of new medical categories, in particular the mongoloid type or Down’s syndrome, first identified at ...”

“... until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was watching the game in a local French café called Gastro. On the final whistle he commiserated with the owner. ‘Of course,’ shrugged M. le Patron, in a what-do-you-expect way, ‘most of the team play in England.’ Superb. The Irish record in World ...”

“... in the subject itself. A poet’s earliest efforts are usually marred by self-consciousness and John Berryman’s are no exception to the rule. For most poets, however, finding a distinct and convincing voice is, at least in part, a process of shedding unwanted affectations and exaggerated self-importance. For Berryman the process was reversed. He learnt to ...”

“... fiats and a ruling-class weapon, but as integral to the contested politics of community life. John Beattie is among the finest exponents of this more historically sensitive approach to crime and punishment. His somewhat misleadingly titled Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (1986) – a pioneering study of trends in crime and prosecution in ...”

“... Rose and the Swan were in Southwark. These areas lay respectively in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, beyond the writ of London’s mayor and aldermen, who generally viewed theatres as a threat to public order, health and decency. Two factors perhaps gave Burbage and his colleagues some cause for optimism. The first was that the Blackfriars, like other ...”

“... born towards the end of the century’. And while he’s very good on the Hampshire history – John Tyndall, Tennyson, Allen’s radical fiction – it doesn’t tell us much about Thompson. The fact that Austen’s Chawton was ‘just twenty miles away’ hardly seems impressive – it’s unlikely Thompson thought that was a short distance; she certainly ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... as rational, calculable and rule-bound. The polarity operates clearly in an epigram coined by Sir John Davies in 1594: Publius, student at the common law, Oft leaves his books, and for his recreation, To Paris Garden doth himself withdraw, Where he is ravished with such delectation, As down among the bears and dogs he goes; Where, whilst he skipping ...”

“... dirty kangaroo, sitting on a lamp-post doing number two,’ was what we used to mutter in our Surrey back-garden. My great uncle, a Presbyterian minister, once told my father the rhyme that had so delighted him in his childhood in the 1860s, a rhyme where the wicked word was never actually uttered. Matilda ate jam, Matilda ate jelly, Matilda went home ...”

“... had hardly heard of: Abaco in the Bahamas, Port Roseway in Nova Scotia, the mouth of the Saint John River on the Bay of Fundy. Newspapers were crammed with advertisements for last-minute sales and announcements about where loyalists were to board their ships. By the time the last British troops pulled out of New York in November 1783, 60,000 loyalists had ...”

“... and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night.’ Technologically primitive Surrey suburbanites were zapped by future war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest. Roaming bands of survivors, heads bandaged, took to the hills; the defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no ...”