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“... interrogated and no doubt threatened with torture. He swiftly broke. The man he had been hiding, William Harrington, might have held out against his questioners, but Henry’s testimony did for him; in February 1594, he was tried, convicted of treason, and hung, drawn and quartered. Henry himself was already long gone. Transferred to a filthy cell in the ...”

“... Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St ...”

“... was published in 1823 – but memories had been jogged more recently. The two-volume Memoirs of William Hazlitt, by his grandson W.C. Hazlitt, had appeared in 1867. The reminiscences of old friends such as Bryan Procter and P.G. Patmore had also been published. Hazlitt was in vogue again: new editions were being prepared, new judgments being framed. How ...”

“... the first person to articulate an elephant’s skeleton, was the younger brother of William Hunter. Both men were pioneering teachers of anatomy. John set up the museum to house his anatomical collection, which has been called his ‘great unwritten book’. Other such collections were either mere taxonomies or else forms of entertainment ...”

“... O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their books. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom, in musing on the use of ...”

“... should all, herself included, ‘refresh our memory on every word Freud has ever written’. Both James Strachey, an Independent, and Isaacs asked what the reaction would have been if Freud’s speculative later works had been written by someone else. Outclassed by their opponents’ scholarship and handicapped by the approbation they themselves had earlier ...”

“... in Oliver Twist was ‘the TRUTH!’ Even Tolstoy needed at times to make the same point. Henry James or George Eliot, on the other hand, never give the impression that the question could arise: the distinction was not part of their artistic outlook or method. But as a touchstone it is still very much around, and can take unexpected forms. Importunity about ...”

“... True, no. Room goes in for a lot of roguish commenting but not for annotation when it is needed. James McConnell, The Benedictine Commando, 1981 – For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Room: ‘The dedication suggests a quotation.’ And that’s true too. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, actually. An editor ought to rise to an occasional ...”

“... prepared actively for months past for an armed struggle and were fired up for action. Revere and William Dawes, a Boston tanner, were originally sent to warn two of the Revolutionary leaders, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were staying at a parsonage in Lexington, that a British force was on its way to arrest them. Both Revere and Dawes successfully ...”

“... as much to social as he does to cricket history; but that hasn’t always been seen. C.L.R. James, the one marxisant historian of cricket there has been, was shocked to find no mention of him in G.M. Trevelyan’s then canonical English Social History, or in the work of such socialist historians as G.D.H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, even though they were ...”

“... of meaning and reference. ‘At least one reader’ turns out, fifty pages later, to have been William Empson. Brown refers, with irrefutable accuracy, to ‘an American woman actress’, ‘Infidelity’ seems to have some occult meaning for him, because he alludes, in a passage about ‘The Dead’, to Gabriel’s ‘fascination with his wife’s ...”

“... would continue in use as a means of evading surrender terms and countering the effects of defeat. James Bamford’s valiant attempt to expose the secrets of the American National Security Agency could well have been subtitled ‘Beyond Ultra’ because he traces the vast expansion that has taken place in espionage and surveillance since Britain divulged the ...”

“... is no smell of passion in the air. Then there are his male mentors, friends and acquaintances: William Ellery Channing; Sampson Reed (one of whose books Emerson considered the best thing since Plato in Plato’s line); Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson admired as a great prophet, and whose work is quite unreadable today); the ‘manifestly insane’ Jones Very ...”

“... the publication of the first of the eight volumes of her History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line in 1763 still remains largely unknown, as does the way she endured the social and intellectual obscurity that lasted from her controversial second marriage in 1778 to her death in a small Berkshire village in 1791. She had ...”

“... Lighthouse by the great civil engineer John Smeaton; and the development of the steam engine by James Watt. There were also the achievements of James Cook, the son of a Yorkshire labourer, who, after surveying Newfoundland between 1763 and 1767, made three voyages to the Pacific, charting the coasts of New Zealand, the ...”