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“... On the​ third morning of his ill-fated occupation of Moscow, Napoleon Bonaparte woke up in the Kremlin to find the city on fire. The isolated blazes set by the retreating Russian armies had spread overnight and were now threatening to leap across the Moskva river to consume the palace. A Russian policeman, hidden in the Kremlin’s arsenal, was caught trying to set light to the building; he was bayoneted to death after a brief interrogation from Napoleon himself ...”

“... Presbyterian goals, a tenet that has endured, with a more secular inflection, as Graham Walker and James Greer recognise, in Ulster Protestantism’s contractarian – and seemingly casual – commitment to the rule of law. The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the ...”

“... its Columbus. Within a few decades this continent had been exploded, mostly by its anti-Columbus, James Cook, and crumbled into a multitude of islands in a vast ocean, mapped, measured and ready for invasion by beachcombers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial administrators and, in their wake, historians. The voyagers, equipped with scientists and ...”

“... On 29 January 1884 Henry James noted a story which he had heard from Gertrude Tennant. It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust ...”

“... and his legacy has rested chiefly on the great critical edition of his correspondence by Percy Stafford Allen, who from 1924 to 1933 was President, appropriately enough, of the outstanding Erasmian foundation at Oxford, Corpus Christi College. The appearance of a comprehensive edition of Erasmus’s letters naturally tended to draw the interest of ...”

“... be left behind. Paul finds the girl he was looking for: he had met her with his mate, Albert, in Stafford and she is sorry he has not brought Albert with him, for her friend, Gwen. He meets a Ukrainian working for (quarrelling with, perhaps living with) a female farmer who sports a mannish shirt and tie. He feels more comfortable with three North Country ...”

“... awakening dates from the production of Ossian,’ Ezra Pound wrote, and he was right. One of James Macpherson’s great contributions to literature was the use of the fragment. His first Ossianic work, the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, published in Edinburgh in 1760, uses in its title and as its form one of the familiar terms of classical scholarship ...”

“... before Charles’s reign, by a client of Burghley under Elizabeth and by the Earl of Exeter under James. They were advocated by such ‘apolitical’ writers as Camden. During the 1630s the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir John Monson, while the largest scheme of all was undertaken by the Earl of ...”

“... stories had been collected by campaigners like Julie Bailey, a café-owner whose mother died in Stafford Hospital after being treated with callous incompetence. In November 2007, Bailey founded a pressure group called Cure the NHS and began to gather reports of patients left to lie for days on urine-soaked beds or allowed to become so thirsty that they ...”

“... base strengthened, public expenditure would have to be contained – as had been agreed by Sir Stafford Cripps (not Gaitskell) and the Cabinet earlier in 1949. What gave additional urgency to the issue was the Korean War in June 1950 and the Cabinet’s subsequent decisions, on two occasions, to increase and to increase again the UK’s defence ...”

“... North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at which point the ...”

“... of the South Seas was always theatrical: the sexual titivations of Tahiti, the triumphs of James Cook and then his death, the loss of Jean François de la Pérouse, the mutiny on the Bounty, the debates on the good and evil effects of missions. The ‘literature’ of this theatre is the preoccupation of Neil Rennie’s Far-Fetched Facts. It takes him ...”

“... clear, is disingenuous: Lee stayed – unlike many of the Clydesiders whose ties to the ILP leader James Maxton were as strong as hers – because she didn’t want to compromise her socialist principles. She believed in fighting for socialism against the enemy, which was sometimes within: ‘I wanted to take part in a political contest where the alignments ...”

“... untouched by it all. Rajasthan, which with its feudal chivalry had fascinated the company agent James Tod, doesn’t seem to have interested Low. And he never turned his long experience into punditry at home although the final years of company rule were littered with old India hands taking sides very publicly. During Low’s lengthiest furlough, between ...”

“... stylised composure; and Whitman’s composure finds its equal among American writers only in Henry James. With majestic aloofness, he likes, as he says early in Song of Myself, to be ‘both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it’. And like the games James plays in The Turn of the Screw, Whitman’s are ...”