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“... in Elizabethan England. Certainly, the link is made in Charles I’s reign by a writer called Henry Blount, whom James Shapiro quotes in Shakespeare and the Jews. In A Voyage into the Levant, Blount likens Jews to radical English Puritans, saying that Jews have ‘light, aerial and fanatical brains, spirited much like our hot apocalypse men’. Eliot’s ...”

“... war studies department, where he is professor of history and foreign policy (he used to hold the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress), and foreign policy adviser to both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; this month he was commissioned to lead yet another defence policy review. In 2016, Bew published a ...”

“... an unhealthy degree of co-dependency between politicians and journalists. When the sketch-writer Henry Lucy first joined the parliamentary corps of the Daily News in the late 1860s, the ‘authorities … regard[ed] the Press as an intruder’. When, around the same time, Wemyss Reid, later editor of the Leeds Mercury, joined the press gallery he discovered ...”

“... Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. Drawing on the arrow shower in Olivier’s film of Henry V, Larkin communicates both disappointment – the ‘sense of falling’ – and a swelling sense of fertility and alert purpose, with more than a hint of tears. Nothing in these letters shows this feeling, and that is what is so mysterious about ...”

“... Offences against the Person Act, itself bundled with six other bills. The same thing happened when Henry Labouchère introduced a clause into the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 replacing ‘attempted sodomy’ or ‘unnatural assault’ with the new offence of ‘gross indecency’, with which Wilde was later charged (Upchurch points out that, contrary to ...”

“... streets or travel on the highways. It was in the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession that Henry Fielding, a Bow Street magistrate as well as a novelist and playwright, began forming the force that would come to be known by the unofficial title of the Bow Street Runners. Fielding the novelist was a tolerant chap who found small infringements of the law ...”

“... which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the ...”

“... to work on – especially because he can’t remember what Big Mal so cryptically said. Next comes Henry England, a.k.a. Hal Nine (aristocracy). Henry is ‘in a ridiculous situation’: he is King of England. More precisely, he is Henry IX. (We are in a parallel universe. And perhaps, in ...”

“... room they’d had last year. The day nursery, which was large, could just about take Teddy, Simon, Henry and Tom.’ There’s even more of this in All Change than in previous instalments. How can Polly (Hugh’s daughter) and her husband, Gerald, make the ugly old house he’s inherited into a viable business? What will ...”

“... to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards Bech the shapeless face of Vernon Klegg, the American Kafka, whose austere minimalist renderings of kitchen spats and dishevelled mobile homes were ...”

“... others, some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader’s share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing with a ...”

“... in the Victorian age, when the cult of domesticity reached its peak. In 1852 the composer Henry Bishop relaunched ‘Home, Sweet Home’, the parlour ballad which the opera singer Jenny Lind made wildly popular. Ten years later the great antiquary Thomas Wright published his History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle ...”

“... reform had built up a great head of steam: crowds were again marching behind the banner of Tom Paine and the rights of man, there were waves of strikes and rioting, and a second French revolution had showed the aristocracy what further escalation might look like. The Reform Act of 1832 resolved the immediate crisis but left a large and vocal majority ...”

“... or a mere trunk with neither arms nor legs’. Uglow recovers the stories of individuals such as Tom Plunket of the Rifle Brigade and his wife: Tom, invalided out of the army after Waterloo, was eventually reduced to selling matches on the street; the face of his wife, who had also been at the battle, was disfigured as a ...”

“... a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham’s proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the single transferable vote (another Jenkins inspiration) likely, it’s thought, to favour Bingham’s chief rival, Chris Patten. At the table I hand in my paper to one of the junior proctors, a ...”