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“... of Lords ruling under the Criminal Justice Act. Overturning the convictions of Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, the Stonehenge Two, for ‘trespassory assembly’ at the site, Lord Irvine described the right of access as ‘an issue of fundamental constitutional importance’. The exclusion zone became illegal and on its website English Heritage now ...”

“... gallery’s founders, and in the half-light among the sarcophagi is a Twombly sculpture: a black rose resting on a marble pebble resting on a box covered in faded velvet. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. Nicholas Cullinan, whose great idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though ...”

“... This list does not include the lost plays from his days as one of Henslowe’s hacks at the Rose, nor the mass of work unpublished at his death: over a hundred miscellaneous pieces of verse, a translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, an English grammar, and the compendium of jottings, musings and mini-essays later collected under the title of Timber (or ...”

“... auburn beard, who was the sovereign’s emissary, the masked executioner stepped forward, the axe rose and fell, and the head rolled. The great portcullis descended, and then there was a click, and the scene went dark. By the time the next person stepped up to the box, and another penny dropped, and the portcullis rose on ...”

“... probity with bronze and granite were becoming popular when, with a great piece of salesmanship, Richard Rogers persuaded Lloyd’s to accept a brilliant, unclubbable cousin of the Pompidou Centre for their headquarters. The sense of the passing of architectural time is particularly strong in London now. The Eighties boom found a city of ...”

“... himself as an Englishman, and as part of that studied act of identity he used to wear a white rose on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth, in memory of Richard III, whom he regarded as the last English – because Plantagenet – king. Coincidentally, Shapiro quotes from a popular postwar textbook, The ...”

“... of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer. The scene: Strauss’s tastefully furnished study in his ...”

“... then would have swived the other sister both’. He fought for the invading Tudor forces against Richard III. Unsubstantiated legend has him as a standard-bearer at Bosworth, cut down close to the person of the man who would soon be king. Whatever the exact truth, he died a hero with a claim on the gratitude of the new regime. He did not leave much land for ...”

“... Nor does she discuss The historical tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots. By the author of Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, As You like It, etc. Deciphered from the works of Sir Francis Bacon by Orville Ward Owen (1894), though its determination not just to promote the National Poet to courtier status but to credit Shakespeare (or at least ‘Shakespeare’) with ...”

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”

“... fucked-up teenager who despised everything she and her chip-off-the-old-block, conformist, Cliff-Richard-adoring teenage daughter smugly stood for. I do see how awful it was for her, but I hate her, still and nevertheless.She was more or less out of my life by 1962, but the ‘ordinary provincial English housewife’ pattern, which I hadn’t come across ...”

“... father had begun life as a peasant farmer before becoming a builder. Even though François Renard rose to be mayor of Chitry, Renard felt acutely the distance between his life and the lives of his parents. He shared many of his father’s tics – tooth-picking, evasive answers, a fear of enemas – but was alert to their differences, and dreaded the ...”

“... catastrophic. In the first six years of the Third Reich the annual number of deaths on the roads rose to nearly eight thousand, with as many as forty thousand seriously injured each year. These were the worst accident rates in Europe, worse even than those in Britain, where speed limits had been abolished in 1930 in the belief that Britons would drive like ...”

“... colonies: the officially recorded number of beatings in Cameroon, certainly an underestimate, rose from 315 in 1900 to 4800 in 1913. African chiefs in Cameroon took their case to the Reichstag, but the governor’s subsequent dismissal had more to do with the objections of traders and missionaries to his policy of granting big land concessions to the ...”

“... soon has ‘the French people … taking to the streets’, he describes how ‘the French rose to the challenge’ and writes sweepingly of ‘the French people’, their ‘patriotic feelings’ and ‘the patriotic frenzy’ that ‘took hold of the country’ after the D-Day landings. Writing a history of the Resistance without simultaneously ...”