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“... there are poems that combine curses, doomed love, the sea and the elegy, such as ‘The Death of Richard Wagner’, whose penultimate stanza describes the effect of hearing his music: As a vision of heaven from the hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of ...”

“... like Marvell a native of Hull, proudly remembered how after 1660 Marvell’s ‘daring genius’ rose to ‘loftier heights’ than ‘beauty’s praise, or plaint of slighted love’, and ‘led the war’ against ‘freedom’s foes’. By the 1890s the same transition was held to have ‘sullied’ his poetic inspiration and ‘buried’ it in ‘the dust ...”

“... autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of 18th-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I ...”

“... on at least one military recruitment broadside during the Napoleonic Wars, but they are spoken by Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son over the usurping John’s poisoned corpse. Even without the undercutting produced by a knowledge of its dramatic context, the play’s final couplet contains a big ‘if’: ‘Naught shall make us rue/If England to ...”

“... emperor and empress live.A day in the life of Akihito and Michiko began at 6.30 a.m., when they rose, watched the television news, then walked around one of the gardens in the Imperial Palace. The old palace buildings were destroyed by the American bombs, and the current buildings date from the late 1960s: smart and dignified, like their occupants, but far ...”

“... autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle ...”

“... but Stendhal would probably have changed that. He considered another, worse possibility: The Rose of the North. ‘A flat and pretentious title,’ he ruefully commented, ‘which seemed fine to me yesterday.’ The work was written in 1837, after Stendhal had abandoned Lucien Leuwen, before he found La Chartreuse. It offers us some hundred pages of the ...”

“... a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their ...”

“... the year 1189. It was paid for, we now know, by William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, who rose from relative obscurity to become regent for the young Henry III and one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshal’s craftsmen used fast-grown trees for the door’s outer face and a powerful lattice of slow-grown timber for the reinforcement inside: no ...”

“... mere ‘hack’ before he became a poet, as some have suggested (indeed his critical biography of Richard Jefferies, Wilson argues, is ‘a classic of the genre’); nor was he ‘grindingly poor’ (‘his earnings between 1906 and 1912 were about the equivalent of a university professor’s’); but ‘perhaps the most serious distortion of the Thomas ...”

“... and idolatrous popery.A preliminary sally in July 1643, when the Parliamentarian commander Colonel Richard Norton had expected ‘much spoil and little opposition’, had ended in failure. It was the first sign that taking Basing House would involve more than strolling through the parkland and bashing down the door, and should have made Waller less sanguine ...”

“... more truly a tool than the butcher’s knife, or the hybridised orchid less a flower than the wild rose. To appreciate Freud’s point would be to overcome what William James called ‘a certain blindness in human beings’. James’s example of this blindness was his own reaction, during a trip through the Appalachian Mountains, to a clearing in which the ...”

“... in 1930, she will belong altogether to some transcendent realm of being: she will be ‘the Rose’ in ‘the Garden/ Where all loves end/Terminate torment/Of love unsatisfied/The greater torment/Of love satisfied.’ In The Waste Land, written for the most part a decade after ‘La Figlia’, and six years into his marriage, the ‘hyacinth ...”

“... and therefore could not expect to inherit, made a name and a living by his knightly prowess. He rose in the service of the Angevin kings and died in 1219 as Regent of England. His career spans the history of the Angevin Empire and can be used to cast light on its political history. Indeed it was so used by Sidney Painter in his fine William Marshal ...”

“... of famine. As soon as resources were switched to finding an anti-malaria vaccine, disease levels rose steeply. The ancient remedy was ‘Jesuit bark’ or quinine, a staple of the African explorers, but this was replaced after World War Two by the alleged ‘miracle drug’, chloroquine. Chloroquine, however, was not cheap, and exhortations from the Third ...”