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“... poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we tour the agonised mind of the Scottish Calvinist Sir Archibald ...”

“... Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus Christ’. Richard Verstegen, a Catholic polemicist, pointed to England’s courting of Muslim allies as proof of their godlessness, writing that ‘if we look what new confederates they have chosen, instead of the old, we shall see them to be the great Turk, the kings of ...”

“... be a godfather to Private Eye, as satire and exultant disrespect returned to Britain in the 1960s. Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook – three decades younger – let him guest-edit a gorgeous special number on the Profumo scandal in 1963, in which, among other scoops, he drove Whitehall to apoplectic fury by printing the name ...”

“... With his attendant expert, Dr Daniel Solander, a gifted pupil of Linnaeus, Banks joined Cook’s Transit of Venus expedition to Tahiti aboard the Endeavour in 1768-71, outspending the Admiralty by a factor of two and a half in outfitting his personal entourage of draftsmen, assistants and servants. On his return to England, Banks reigned as one of ...”

“... fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with Meriel ...”

“... off his debts by working on big-budget projects like Papillon (1973). Dalton Trumbo (1977), Bruce Cook’s genial and thorough biography, suggests that the life he designed for himself ‘rivals, and really surpasses any literary work he has undertaken’. He was born in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1905. His father was a gentle, bookish, bee-keeping shop ...”

“... is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it could never have worked. The strategy was foolish and hopeless. One major of the Gurkhas thought that this ...”

“... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...”

“... last great cause’ is echoed in the reminiscences of the international volunteers quoted in Richard Baxell’s exhaustive study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that ...”

“... for Marcus Tullius Cicero after the latter’s victory over Catiline in 63 BC. A young Sicilian cook prepared the dish, which was carried in by four Ethiopian slaves. Baskets of dates were suspended from the boar’s tusks. Piglets in pastry surrounded it. When the boar was cut open, a second animal was discovered within it, and a third, and a fourth. The ...”

“... at leveraging his assets, as the phrase goes now. He could see what Elizabeth wanted and could cook up plausible and cheap schemes to achieve it. It’s likely that these abilities fuelled his rise to favour. In 1580, just before he became really powerful, Ralegh served under Lord Grey in Ireland. Here he witnessed the massacre of a Spanish garrison at ...”

“... large numbers of leading intellectuals, from, say, Herbert Spencer through H.G. Wells and on to Richard Hoggart and beyond, exhibited no such consanguinity.However, even if many of the more sweeping generalisations about the social homogeneity of intellectuals in Britain prove on closer inspection to be false, it remains true that some families do appear to ...”

“... their most sparky when working for the DNB: Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Shiva Naipaul, for instance, or Richard Ingrams on Claud Cockburn (although Ingrams has taken the trouble, it seems, to check through the Times’s files in search of that famous Cockburn headline: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead’. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t there.) Strange that ...”

“... phenomenon. Although Chamberlain’s return from Munich was televised live (with commentary by Richard Dimbleby), the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ...”

“... most Parisians, but Ayer lived in Guy de Rothschild’s house in Paris, supported by a butler, a cook and a good cellar. When this arduous postwar service was over he returned to Oxford, at a time when philosophy in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was ...”