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“... The encounter between Alain Corbin and François-Louis Pinagot was at one level fortuitous. The historian picked the dead peasant’s name from the register of births in a provincial archive. He set out to bring him back from oblivion by following the meagre traces left in the bureaucratic records of the French state when the most subordinate of its agents – mayors, foresters, tax collectors – made fleeting contact with, or more often narrowly missed, one of their humblest and least troublesome administrés ...”

“... Who was Gyp? A woman of many names: a sign, suggests Willa Silverman, of her often-expressed unhappiness with her identity, and especially her sex. She was born Sibylle de Riquetti de Mirabeau in 1849, but her family decided to call her Gabrielle when she reached13 because she was too plain for a Sibylle. Married in 1869, to become the Comtesse de Martel de Janville, she lamented that as a woman she could not perpetuate the Mirabeau name, which she often appended to her own ...”

“... Europeans coming to Veracruz during the 19th century were invariably impressed by its large population of vultures and sharks. Those who arrived in the 1860s in pursuit of Napoleon III’s Mexican dream, or who followed in the train of Maximilian von Habsburg in the hope of sharing in the glory and profit of his new empire, found what one French officer called ‘these disgusting animals’ which ‘stalk you like a prey’ a sobering sight ...”

“... as being in the territory of the English. England has never existed in isolation. According to Robert Tombs, it has existed as itself only for a couple of relatively brief periods in its long history, ‘between Alfred and Cnut, and again (though by then including Wales) under the Tudors’. It has more often existed as part of a larger multinational ...”

“... crags, to draw the chill fi the city’s banes. I’ the kirkyaird, doos flap an rise amang the tombs. Did these wierd carved cherabim cam fleucherin roon you, in your mad room? See – a dosser’s blanket, drapt in a mausoleum – we live and dee, and while leeving, heap stane on stane. Ootbye, cranes turn, navvies big wir pairliament, a birth in ...”

“... on slow commuter diesels They passed the bare brick shells of loco-sheds Like great robbed tombs. They eyed the proud slave faces Of laid-off engineering workers, lost In the electronics revolution. Along the prom They’d holidayed on in childhood, with exotic walking-sticks, History in Residence, they moved In Sophoclean raincoats. People laughed At ...”

“... Patel, would have had to go for being officially found guilty of bullying her staff; so would Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, for a ripe lobbying scandal.As for policymaking, a concern for accuracy was supposed to go hand in hand with a thorough and detailed examination of pros and cons, a proper submission of papers and keeping of records, rather ...”

“... yet dean of St Paul’s, recorded that one of the vergers was charging visitors to see the royal tombs. The crucial events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent decision to make it a Royal Peculiar. This put it outside the jurisdiction of the Church of England, answerable only ...”

“... In the section of The Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to the perils of religious enthusiasm, Robert Burton pauses briefly to comment on the complex and meritorious rituals of the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca: their fastings, their running till they sweat, their long prayers, Mahomets temple, tombe, and building of it, would aske a whole volume to dilate: and for their paines taken in this holy pilgrimage, all their sins are forgiven, and they are reputed so many saints ...”

“... ever penetrating beyond the choir, to the shrine of St Edward behind the High Altar and the royal tombs which surround it. Yet this was the heart of medieval Westminster, and the reason for the existence of the present building. Those who skip it miss more than holy bones. Within the shrine space, near the tomb of St Edward, stands the Coronation Chair, and ...”

“... recipients are now well trained. Which is why America’s Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first ...”

“... out to solve has nothing to do with why so many people died horrible deaths after plundering the tombs of the pharaohs. For a start, it’s not clear that so many did: Douglas Murray only lost an arm, though the ‘Unlucky Mummy’ supposedly responsible for his misfortune was also rumoured to have been on board the Titanic when it sank. In fact it was ...”

“... Spencer so repeatedly paints the Resurrection. Only on the Last Day when the dead arise from their tombs and the dustmen struggle free from their dustbins, will the ideal co-existence of personal autonomy and universal harmony cease to be an unresolved paradox and become a joyous reality. Eschatology, however, provides only a conceptual answer to the problem ...”

“... they acquired a reputation for crankiness. Drawings in Making History show them in action opening tombs, taking pickaxes to prehistoric barrows and climbing across a spindly ladder high up in Lincoln Cathedral to inspect the concealed ‘prison chamber’. Since the study of local antiquities did not require a classical education or a grand tour, members ...”

“... again, only Herbert comes into precise comparison, Popish prelates and Dissenters not qualifying. Robert Herrick has three mentions, but his poetic genius is too lofty to arouse envy: one can but read with haunted admiration the deceptively innocent lyrical outpourings from his Devonshire vicarage. John Donne, the greatest of the deans of St ...”