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“... the occasional approach of ‘the ogres that were then still native to this land’. King Arthur is remembered not just as a legend but as someone it was possible to serve. Britons and Saxons live in separate communities but with a certain amount of overlap, any tensions kept below a simmer. You could describe events in the book as dreamlike, except ...”

“... historians in the United States than there are in France itself, and they are disproportionately young. Far more than ever before, it is now their historiographical world. But how far do they deserve it?There are perils in success. Highly fashionable as well as highly theoretical, French history can sometimes appear to outsiders to be weighed down and ...”

“... Saudi royal family, the role of intoxicants in the life of journalism was already on the decline. Young journalists, many of whom are women nowadays, are quite as likely to ask for a Perrier water or a white wine and soda as to order a large scotch or a pint of bitter. In some respects, this is no less important a change in the ambience of our trade than the ...”

“... a successful political career, securing election to Stormont as an independent Unionist. The young Ian Paisley used to travel to the parliament building in Nixon’s car, and he called Nixon ‘the most able and effective politician of his days’. The RUC-Loyalist murder gangs killed with gruesome theatricality. Crucifixes and rosary beads were draped ...”

“... a sexual, political or religious nature. A celebrated case at the turn of the century involved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After eight months of horse-ripping in Staffordshire, a series of anonymous letters directed police suspicion to a young Anglican clergyman named George Edalji, who was the son of a Hindu. Edalji was ...”

“... to rhetoric and the prosaic presentation has a special explanation. Victor Noir was a handsome young journalist shot after a quarrel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The Prince was acquitted of murder, but the Republicans ensured that the plain facts were recorded in bronze. The work has been taken as an extreme example of a tendency in 19th-century sculpture ...”

“... to the survival of the British nation,’ he had declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms … a nation which loses sight of its past cannot long expect to enjoy its future.’ A Tory politician asking us to include among ‘the national ...”

“... temptation to give this high romance a touch of the demotic: It was Christmas at Camelot – King Arthur’s court, where the great and the good of the land had gathered, all the righteous lords of the ranks of the Round Table quite properly carousing and revelling in pleasure. Compare O’Donoghue’s: It was Christmas at Camelot, and there was the king ...”

“... father. On Capri he was to see himself as Byron, D.H. Lawrence as Shelley and Francis Brett Young as a more retiring kind of Keats. And Lawrence was fascinated by him, found him sympathetic and good company, and made him the model in his story called ‘The man who loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence himself, and shows the ...”

“... Beneath their capacious skirts, Fanny and Stella were Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, two young cross-dressers who were put on trial in Westminster Hall in 1871. Cross-dressing was not a criminal offence, so the men were charged instead with outraging public decency. On the slightest of pretexts, the prosecution also threw in ‘the abominable crime of buggery’, along with conspiracy to incite others to do the same ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... he had been estranged. Trollope, as strict in his daily routine as Anny was chaotic, welcomed the young women into his ‘sweet old prim, chill house wrapped in snow’. Tennyson was a close friend, and the Isle of Wight, where Anny and Minny were sheltered by the irrepressible Julia Margaret Cameron, became a lifelong refuge. Anny relished the island ...”

“... badly printed volume of Schiller’s poems becomes the medium through which a Dominican monk, a young Ruthenian village schoolmaster and a poor Jewish boy from a shtetl in what the author bitterly calls ‘Demi-Asia’ (‘Halb-Asien’) find the liberation that the 19th-century version of education and modern culture had to offer. The story culminates in a ...”

“... rackety literary man, author of the forgotten epic ‘Orion’, who had been a friend of the young Meredith; and it describes, with that striking domestic vividness of which even the most commonplace Victorians seem to have been capable in their correspondence, a three-week stay recently undergone in the Meredith ménage. It is clear that Catherine Horne ...”

“... with him; but there were always the faithful who remembered and read him, and a few years ago his young man’s trilogy from the early Thirties, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, was republished. Personality is important for a cult. The life must be close to the work, and almost but not quite a substitute for it, while the work itself is intimate with ...”