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“... and religion. For a balanced view, you would almost do better with Thomas Hughes. Alfred Smyth’s King Alfred the Great may be highly contentious but it is a formidable work. At this point a confession of interest has to be made. The most original feature of the book is Smyth’s dismissal, as a later forgery, of Asser’s Life, on which all earlier ...”

“... is about three sisters. 19-year-old Elinor and 17-year-old Marianne have a sister, the 13-year-old Margaret. Margaret Dashwood is so consistently invisible to criticism, that it can seem a special quality in an essay to notice Margaret. Much of the very best recent criticism of Jane Austen ...”

“... the telling of the story another woman, also a wife and mother, looms large, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The introduction is written by Jane Ewart-Biggs. Lady Ewart-Biggs speaks for those throughout the country who listened with growing dismay to the debate in Parliament on 3 April 1982 which culminated in the despatch of the Task Force with ...”

“... account of the Burgundian and French contexts in which Anne was raised to be a lady of the court. Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she owned ...”

“... includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s ...”

“... 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England. Unfortunately, her ghastly gynaecological difficulties, which may have ...”

“... overthrew the Medici in November 1494, which resulted from the arrival in the region of the French King Charles VIII with a large army and which was mounted by members of the Florentine political aristocracy: indeed, up to that time he had, as head of a convent which was a Medici foundation, naturally rather genuflected to the family. His main ...”

“... very well since. Kenneth Anger has been this kind of wallflower at the orgy for years. The dragon king of gorgeous Hollywood has him in thrall. His snappy chapter-headings (‘Closely Observed Blondes’, ‘Babylon Boozers’, ‘Hollywood Drugstore’) give a promise that is always kept. A sample from another chapter (‘The Magic of Self-Murder’) conveys ...”

“... and military careers. The editor and translator of Llyfr Belgywryd (the Law Book of the Welsh King Hywel the Good), the author of the Lexicon to Herodotus, of a massive history of The House of Lords in the Middle Ages, of a short life of Joseph Chamberlain, and of the major work on the reinterpretation of the New Testament on which he is presently ...”

“... to frequent moments of absurdity. For instance, a female character in one of the poems is called Margaret, so we are told that ‘close to the time when’ (but far from the place where) Halleck wrote this poem, ‘Margaret’ was an alternative term for the ‘mollies’ (cross-dressing, man-loving men) of old ...”

“... immediately after the conquest of Lydia by Cyrus, the aggressive and imperially expansive young king of Persia – the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had previously lived under the easy-going rule of Croesus the Lydian, and had received a sharp rebuff when they tried to get a similar deal from Cyrus, approached the Spartans for a protective alliance. The ...”

“... or ‘dark’, this was neither a geographic or ethnic identification, nor connected with lineage: King Louis XI of France was described by a German viewer as ‘brown’. Groebner tells us that ‘the skin colours that European travellers caught sight of in various parts of the New World in the 16th century coincided with those they employed to describe their ...”

“... and alliances. James’s decision in 1502 to seek peace with England, sealed by his marriage to Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s daughter, the next year, was a pragmatic one. The match, lauded by Dunbar as the marriage of ‘the Thistle and the Rose’, didn’t mean stable peace let alone a friendship between Tudors and Stewarts that might point to future ...”

“... submarine Santa Fe, which was damaged by a British depth charge and surrendered to the marines at King Edward Point. According to an MoD board of inquiry, Artuso was killed while working as a prisoner of war on a repair of the Santa Fe when a marine, who saw the expression on his face change and thought that he was either going for a weapon or trying to ...”

“... from the four walls. Historians and biographers have never offered identical portraits of the king. For A.F. Pollard, writing a hundred years ago, Henry was a Land of Hope and Glory monarch, who by some divine intuition foresaw his country’s destiny and laid its foundations. ‘It was the king, and the ...”