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“... brought before a Placean tribunal. Dr McCalman has things to say in their defence, but seems to grant that the final verdict must go against them. Francis Place approved of Spence’s views. He became his friend and associate through the London Corresponding Society, and much later in life collected materials (including recollections from George Cannon) for ...”

“... however brilliantly it may flesh out the individual stories behind the Belott-Mountjoy suit or the grant of arms or the trouble over the enclosures at Wellcombe, Honan’s book hedges its bets whenever we get too close to the key questions. Where the facts are unambiguously clear, he can be splendidly direct, as in his lucid statement of the 20-year-old ...”

“... he says in a poem, ‘Wenn man ihr alles gewährt, wenn man ihr alles versagt’ – ‘if we grant it everything, if we deny it everything’. His Faust is a man who has ‘undertaken never to rest in the contemplation of beauty’, Boyle says. Or in anything else. ‘His modern pact with the devil gives him access to every human experience, but only as ...”

“... Sejanus can still be. Perry acknowledges in passing that leaders of Western democracies still grant and receive personal favours, and hence that there is still such a thing as a ‘politics of access’; as well he might, writing so soon after President Clinton gave Americans occasion to learn exactly what any Renaissance court favourite would have found ...”

“... students for public school entrance. There were four kinds of secondary school: public, direct-grant (which received state funding from Whitehall on condition that they took a proportion of their pupils on scholarships), grammar and secondary modern. By this time Labour was committed to comprehensive education, having accepted the argument that the ...”

“... were Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey and Forster. Mary Hutchinson and Sydney Waterlow were also invited but fell by the wayside. Even by Bloomsbury standards it was an exclusive set. The members were all related by blood or marriage or, which weighed more heavily ...”

“... was its longevity: the way she continues four hundred years after her death to conduct, as Michael Dobson and Nicola Watson put it in this engaging book, ‘a posthumous progress through the collective psyche of her country’. Historians, beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick ...”

“... emigré: the book quotes a fuddy-duddy smack at Surrealism from the Czech-born Tom Stoppard. Michael Wood quotes V.S. Naipaul’s country-pub-landlord comments of 1951 on the passing of Oxford’s golden age, having just arrived in the place as a young-fogeyish 18-year-old: ‘Gone are the days of the aristocrats. Nearly everyone comes to Oxford on a ...”

“... by nightly vigils at his pupil’s bedside – the boy was addicted to masturbation. A generous grant from Frau von Kalb allowed him to continue his philosophical studies at the university of Jena. He translated Ovid’s episode of Phaethon for Schiller’s journal, and worked on an early version of his novel Hyperion, the story of a young Greek idealist ...”

“... they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul Heinrich Mann. She had definite artistic talents, played the piano quite nicely and sang. My husband learned the entire ...”

“... but was a shrewd Parliamentarian. Jenkins, bearing an old political grudge, turned instead to Michael Foot, who declined, knowing that Abse was the man for the job. Jenkins finally accepted this. Abse’s rather florid taste in waistcoats had already made him conspicuous. Tam Dalyell begged him not to ‘wear his funny dresses’ but Abse’s ...”

“... the other three rushed off too quickly to be recognisable. So, I earmarked a portion of my travel grant for paying alert local companions and encountered only one more snake in the rest of the six-month trip. They must have been all around, but the precaution paid off. Despite the tendency of most snakes to make themselves scarce in the presence of noisy ...”

“... is the theme of The Reign of James VI (2000), a collection of essays edited by Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch. The most radical suggestion has been made by Jenny Wormald, who regards James’s reign overall as a ‘triumphant success’, and any problems after 1603 as a consequence of English xenophobia and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Given the ...”

“... what the firm itself sold for on the open market. On the face of it, the valuation is astounding. Michael Bott, currently in charge of ” the Reading collection, said that he first thought a decimal point had gone missing. And if the Murray archive is worth those many millions, how much is the (firmly closed) Aladdin’s cave, the Faber ...”

“... If he wanted to, Lyle could return to Gloucestershire, where a medical board will probably grant him parole. To Irvine’s frustration, he holds off, partly because of his commitment to Gurney and partly because institutions are now his only home. Lyle is another of those orphans, like Irvine, whose entire family has been picked off by combat or ...”