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“... sounds little different from most prep schools of the time. The real disaster came when he entered King’s School, Canterbury (alma mater of Christopher Marlowe, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh-Fermor), from which Brooke ran away in the first week. He was sent back. The second week he ran away again. The second withdrawal marked the termination of his ...”

“... a half yards of red livery cloth issued to Shakespeare as a token of his new status as one of the King’s Majesty’s Servants might be as significant as the company’s move to a new playhouse; and for Shapiro it was almost as important to understand the structural underpinnings of that theatre as to explore the material foundations of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... Like most biographers, Anthony Masters starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter ...”

“... a Number. That book also caused a furore in North America. It had its supporters – among them, Anthony Lewis in the New York Times and Leon Wieseltier in Dissent (Wieseltier has written a rather different review of The Longest War in Harper’s). But, because Timerman rails against fascists of the right as well as those on the left, it had the misfortune ...”

“... the mere process of joining up became a major hurdle. The clandestine volunteers were sent from King Street to the Comintern headquarters in Paris, and then down to Perpignan, egged on by the clenched fists of peasants and shadowed by the police. After hiding in the woods they had to walk over the Pyrenees, dodging the searchlights and bullets of French ...”

“... which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. [Emphasis mine.] On page 222 of Anthony Summers’s vastly enjoyable and revealing book, we find J. Edgar Hoover’s lovely home in Rock Creek Park being done up at taxpayers’ expense, complete with ‘hand-crafted fruit bowl’ and ‘a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI ...”

“... kept breaking through. It is always interesting to speculate about motivation. The psychologist Anthony Storr put forward the theory that Churchill was a depressive engaged in a hyperactive struggle to ward off the blues, and the evidence bears this out. Until reading Gilbert I had never quite realised before what a mania Churchill had for travel in ...”

“... royal nobleman in her house. She thought Surrey’s father, the Duke of Norfolk, might become king if Henry VIII died without a male heir (‘if ought should come to the King but good, his father should stand for king’), and declared that above his bed were arms ‘very like the ...”

“... should be present for any royal birth. (This ‘ancient tradition’ dated back to the reign of King James II and the rumour about the ‘warming-pan baby’ delivered covertly to his consort, Mary of Modena.) So J.R. Clynes, Home Secretary to Ramsay MacDonald, had to journey to Glamis Castle and wait for 16 days for the waters to break. He passed the time ...”

“... Before we come to Philip’s internal strife, we have to contend with the randy bonhomie of old King George. It is said that American viewers are distressed to find the word ‘cunt’ used in the first episode, spoken by George VI (Jared Harris) to his valet, but perhaps this is merely the latest in a long line of gifts from Britain to the former ...”

“... claiming that she was the one who rescued an image of the Virgin from a mosque, Aladine, the pagan king, feels ‘un non so che di inusato e molle’ (‘an I don’t know what of unaccustomed softness’). Un non so che is the emotional and intellectual correlative of Tasso’s twilight. The phrase often occurs when he has allowed someone to display a set of ...”

“... menacing of a succession of ‘Tudor Rebellions’, to quote the title of a seasoned classic by Anthony Fletcher (1968), recently revised by Diarmaid MacCulloch and reissued (1997). But in the perception of the actors this was not rebellion at all, and when they found themselves described as rebels in intercepted government bulletins, their fury almost ...”

“... technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering the Hejaz in 1926, he allowed Jeddah’s foreign community to import alcohol openly: he was forced to end this concession when the British consul, who used to serve drinks to his Saudi guests, was shot dead by a drunken young prince. Since ...”

“... having made the minimal consequential changes when he took over. ‘The answer is that Sir Anthony Eden has been dithering. He has made up his mind, changed it, made it up again, and changed it again. He has listened to advice and heeded pressures not merely up to the point of decision but far beyond it.’ Like Rosebery, another Foreign Secretary who ...”

“... safer with a fifty-year-old President. Other stock characters are borrowed from fiction, notably King Solomon’s Mines, which D.M. Thomas read with interest when he was a small boy in Australia. Like other boys, he wondered what sort of quarterdeck language Commander Good used when he was swearing at Zulus and whether he responded erotically to the devotion ...”