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“... in the 1840s to populate the huge rockery, fissured with crevices and ravines, which Sir Charles Isham created in front of his bedroom window. The rockery reflected Isham’s love of the Alpine but he was also widely read in folklore, a believer in spiritualism and convinced of the existence of ‘mine fairies’. Vegetarian, against blood ...”

“... Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior? I met the man who ordered this operation, the defence minister Charles Hernu, not long before it took place. I still have the autographed copy of his book that he gave me, Nous … les grands, which has a picture of a French nuclear submarine on the cover. He seemed to me a man of gravitas and good sense, but shortly after ...”

“... Essex. 7. 1828, month unknown. Shot at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, Yorkshire, by the keeper of Lord Charles Stourton. 8. 1840, month unknown. Caught in a state of exhaustion near Marshchapel in North Lincolnshire. 9. 1841, 21 December. Shot at Margate, Kent, by a boy ‘employed in keeping crows’; sold to a dealer for fourpence, then exhibited in Margate ...”

“... oblivious to the Gothic values, run wire fences across the cherished sward and set up a silver-fox farm. The novel doesn’t quite say so, but Tony’s failure is really a function of his Anglicanism, which Waugh thought an enfeebling disposition to believe nothing very much. ‘Do you believe in God?’ Mr Todd asks Tony, to which he flimsily ...”

“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... Otley Chevin, too – or Rain, Steam and Speed. ‘Colchester, Essex’ (c.1825) Until the fox became the object of the chase in the mid-19th century, hares were as central to hunting as deer. ‘Of all the chases, the hare makes the greatest pastime and pleasure,’ wrote the anonymous 18th-century author of The Huntsman. According to Gaston ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”

“... to me in the stalls. How could Pinocchio be so stupid as to be led astray by the patently wicked Fox, or Snow White not know the Queen was up to no good? Had the Queen been flesh and blood and not a cartoon she might well have been played by Joan Crawford, who was always something of an enigma to me. I never liked her, and with her gaunt face, protruding ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”

“... sent to John Taylor. He was in exalted company: other recipients of presentation copies included Charles James Fox, the Duchess of Devonshire, Anna Barbauld, ‘Monk’ Lewis, Dorothy Jordan and William Wilberforce. Taylor’s politics had not changed: he was still involved with the True Briton, and had recently been ...”

“... or any kind of civil liberty. One of Eisenhower’s first moves as president was to appoint Charles Erwin Wilson, the head of General Motors, as secretary of defense. He is the man who said: ‘What is good for General Motors is good for the country and what is good for the country is good for General Motors.’ ‘No administration,’ Stone ...”

“... callow young men should have been the first to invade the floor of the House of Commons since Charles I seems vandalism not so much of the Commons itself as of tradition, the more so because it’s in aid of such an ignoble cause. Though I feel much the same about another vandal, Lord Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of lord ...”

“... this, forgetting to mention that Rome was in fact taken by mercenaries of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. More was astonishingly disingenuous. Throughout the late 1520s, he claimed that anti-clericalism was identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails ...”

“... a second-class man, and Bagehot was not often wrong.’ Peel lacked the inspirational qualities of Fox and the Pitts, of Gladstone and Disraeli, ‘which is why no party has taken his memory into its care’. This is surely nonsense. Peel is a far more vibrant presence in Conservative politics today than any of the others, because he engaged with the modern ...”

“... inquiries in London might damage his News Corp business in the US, where his holdings included the Fox TV network. He and his fellow directors stood to be prosecuted in the UK under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Having covered up its activities for years, News Corp reached for the ...”