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“... Sir​ Nicholas Henderson was British ambassador almost everywhere that mattered – Bonn, Paris, Washington. He met all the great personalities of the second half of the 20th century. Yet in conversation he reverted, time and again, to the few years he spent in his twenties as assistant private secretary to Ernest Bevin ...”

“... prophesies about the fate of Royalists and Catholics. Another fanatical anti-Royalist was Nicholas Culpeper – author of the famous Herbal (1653) – who practised ‘astrological physic’ (another legacy of Paracelsus). He was denounced as a sectarian and ‘absolute Atheist’. In all his prescriptions, claimed the Royalist news-sheet Mercurius ...”

“... than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in the elaboration of the scenario: Taruskin redresses the balance by describing in detail Roerich’s contribution and four Russian sources he probably used for elaborating the ballet’s striking visual imagery. Stravinsky shaped events to make ...”

“... there’s a roof that needs retiling, and painted over the door of that mansion is a fading St Christopher. A further scale down, inhabitants appear: the finely dressed know-all, five millimetres high, who leans out from the window next to the mansion door, wisecracking to a friend; or the madam and client – perhaps – below the nearest downspout. I ...”

“... of this art being Guy Liddell. The development of this intelligence community is the theme of Christopher Andrew’s book, which contains the first reliable narrative history of the secret services from Victorian days to the present. Needless to say, he has received no encouragement from Whitehall, and former members of MI5 have been warned not to talk to ...”

“... 1983) to the painter Barrie Cooke, where he describes fishing on Lake Victoria with his son, Nicholas:Nick & I went across one night – a biggish sea, a very big load of fish, sailing into the most incredible display of lightning I ever saw. Truly like a thunderstorm on an electrified planet in a space fiction film. We got into a race with another ...”

“... rare direct comment on dress, but since the novel is a parody the remark is ironic, as defined by Christopher Ricks, in that it is both true and not true to the same extent at the same time. ‘Woman is fine for her satisfaction alone,’ Austen writes. ‘No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.’ In parody the text works ...”

“... with New Labour. The establishment decided to wheel out the chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front ...”

“... was swelling the Catholic population not only of the US but also of England. Catholic priests like Nicholas Wiseman were preaching to huge congregations. In 1850 the pope issued a brief dividing England into 12 bishoprics, under Wiseman as cardinal archbishop of Westminster, and Wiseman responded by proclaiming that England was about to rejoin the Mother ...”

“... Robert Graves’s Owl; and, in pre-Revolutionary Russia, Diaghilev’s Mir Iskusstva was funded by Nicholas II. Sometimes patronage was diffused: Harriet Monroe induced affluent Chicagoans to pledge $50 per year over five years to Poetry by convincing them that her fledgling magazine would be ‘the most important aesthetic advertisement Chicago ever ...”

“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... remained firmly committed to the Westernisation that had created it. Even during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) – an arch-counterrevolutionary – the embrace of narodnost (sometimes translated as ‘nationality’ but meaning something like ‘being of the people’) remained relatively superficial. It was the Slavophiles, a group of Herder-inspired ...”

“... or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with the deer forests about which his rich schoolfellows used to ...”

“... 2001) is unhelpful. In Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001), Nicholas Dirks does a first-rate job of summarising the debate between English historians of India, such as Christopher Bayly and David Washbrook, who downplay the corrupting nature of empire by assigning a good deal of the ...”

“... skill with Leibniz, the astronomers Johannes Hevelius and John Flamsteed, the cartographer Nicholas Mercator and, most disastrously, with Newton, who, Hooke claimed, had plagiarised from him the inverse-square law of gravitation. If you crossed Hooke’s interests, you were in for some of the ripest abuse going: his enemies were, variously, ‘ignorant ...”