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“... the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls them, ‘a conspiracy of nobodies’. It is a bittersweet story, and one that goes far to explain why most modern architecture is so awful. Like Sydney, the Opera House was a British idea. Sir Eugene Goossens, the violinist and ...”

“... Four hundred years ago, on 17 October 1586, Sir Philip Sidney died at the age of 31 of a wound sustained in a skirmish at Zutphen, where his forces had fought for the Dutch cause against Spanish domination of the Netherlands. It was one of the great deaths of English history. His early biographers – or hagiographers – wrought a tale of battlefield heroism and deathbed stoicism that helped the myth of Sidney to become more powerful than the man had ever been ...”

“... Around my tent until I couldn’t see. Only a small rhinoceros chased me. The spectral sun-bird drew the mountain near, And if the rain-bird singing soon soon soon Turned white clouds purple, still the air was clear – The radiant behind of a baboon Was not more opulent than the full moon. So one more tourist should have been agog At treasure picked up ...”

“... Philip​ Habsburg landed at Southampton on 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England ...”

“... a tussle, and the youth jumped back a step or two. His intention, though, was not conciliatory. He drew something metallic from his pocket and raised it above his head ready to strike, and also set his feet further apart in a combat posture. ‘Now you’re fucking dead,’ he told us. René raised his hands to defend himself and was shoved back against a ...”

“... country, pines for the specious distractions of the big smoke: ‘The whole point,’ the scholar Philip Drew maintained, ‘is that the contrasts drawn by the speaker, with his exaggerated ideas of savoir vivre, are all reversed by the reader.’ But you don’t need independently to know about Browning’s love for a bustling urban scene to realise ...”

“... It always comes as something of a surprise to remember that thirty years before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there ...”

“... by side until, after a long silence he halted, looked at me, slowly put his arms around me, and drew me to him. I had certainly not wished for such a development. He stared at me in some excitement but when he noticed my lack of response he instantly let go and turned away. Then I saw him raise his hands beseechingly: ‘How can I love a woman until I have ...”

“... between 35 and 55 and of a younger woman, a pair Andronikos soon identified as the Macedonian king Philip II – father of Alexander the Great, builder of the army and the European empire that gave his son the means to conquer the world – and one of his seven wives. But it was not long before different candidates were proposed, as experts started to examine ...”

“... sense, the popular success of Górecki constitutes a threat distinctly different from that of a Philip Glass or a Steve Reich – not to mention Michael Nyman, the most candidly and astutely ‘commercial’ of Post-Modern British composers. Even at the lowest level, the real benefits (if not the cost-benefits) of performing Górecki’s Third are quite ...”

“... Leon Moisseiff, the chief engineer, who also designed the clunky but resilient Manhattan Bridge, drew up the Tacoma Narrows as he did in part for artistic reasons; before it failed he called it ‘the most beautiful bridge in the world’. It was the beauty of a design culture seeking the sleek and the fine as an expression of an insurgent modernism, and of ...”

“... In the summer of 1618, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, Ambassador of Philip III to the Court of James I had a clever idea. For four years the proposal that James’s son Prince Charles should marry the Infanta Maria had been batted to and fro between London and Madrid in an attempt to bring about an Anglo-Spanish alliance ...”

“... his major task. As for Elliott’s studies of the court and palaces of the Count-Duke’s master, Philip IV, and of the revolt of the Catalans against their joint regime, they complement rather than compete with the book now under review. There are two obvious reasons for this neglect of a major Spanish statesman. The first is that he failed, while his rival ...”

“... of possible candidates. Rather, Neville Chamberlain, Hailsham, Horne and others felt inhibited or drew back from striking at Baldwin because they feared that allegations that the party leadership had been changed at the behest of newspaper proprietors might severely damage the Party and their own prospects. While not underestimating the hierarchical and ...”

“... possible is called out too.’Vargas Llosa’s powerful first novel, The Time of the Hero, drew on memories of the Leoncio Prado Military Academy to enforce his grim conviction of the 1960s, expressed to Luis Harss: ‘I think in a country like mine violence is at the root of all human relations.’ This led him to state, rather chillingly: ‘I’ve ...”