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“... the law officers perhaps doubted whether the more serious charge would hold up. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie, which revealed parallel plots for insurrection in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, set a more direct precedent. They were the first trials for high treason to take place in Scotland since the 1351 statute had become law there. The ...”

“... the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But we are left wondering if there isn’t some sort of baffled innocence lurking in her evildoings. The ...”

“... pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan warriors. There was a need to face the facts of war. Percy Hennell made records of reconstructive surgery; in the exhibition you can see a soldier who has had the socket of his lost eye patched over with a ...”

“... Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future fortunes of us both’. The tourists had planned to stop in Oxford for three or four days but ended up staying three weeks. When they finally set out for Wales, Coleridge’s head ...”

“... and heroines have mystical attachments to the distinctive red clay and rock of the region, to Stone Age monuments and palaeolithic flints. Gibbon’s extended descriptions of these features of the Mearns landscape constitute his most powerful writing. At the time of his death, Gibbon had not clearly worked out his relationship to Scotland, more ...”

“... radical cultural transformation. It meant, for example, the coming of the book and of building in stone. As Patrick Wormald suggests, these are changes the significance of which should be understood by an age which has itself seen the advent of the microchip and pre-stressed concrete. In government, in art and in literature the Anglo-Saxons showed ...”

“... socialism of James Connolly, two of the 16 who, along with MacBride, were executed in 1916. Robert Wohl in his book The Generation of 1914 writes about the vogue of martial mysticism that took hold all over Europe at the time, and Ireland was not immune. Hindsight may regard it as unhealthy, largely because of the fate of that generation, but also ...”

“... of blacks from political life. It also leads through the reconvening of the Ku-Klux-Klan at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta after the 1915 première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of ...”

“... the prescription, spending her time playing in the street until she smashed her head on a paving stone. So her father left her at a riverside pub while he visited the industrial marvels of the Bridgewater Canal. ‘The whole seems to be the work of the Titans, rather than a production of our pygmy race of beings,’ Wedgwood wrote in his diary. As for his ...”

“... village perched on a ridge above the Evenlode valley looking across to Stonesfield (where the stone slates are quarried) and the back of Blenheim Park. Here Rowse began collecting notes for a poem so I pointed out a great rosemary bush in flower to him and told him it was marjoram. I look forward to the published error. At North Leigh we saw Mr Hevesi ...”

“... presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and Browning. Pound and, yes, Hill – are brought to judgment. This is not overt. Robinson can’t, any more than the rest of us, come on like a latter-day Leavis, a fearlessly normative critic; instead, psychologists and moral philosophers are ...”

“... first as mercenaries, for pay, and then as rebels, for land: Hervé (full name not known), Robert Crispin (or ‘Curly’) and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with ...”

“... on tomb sculpture, ‘the static intermediary between the earthly and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and ...”

“... James Fox in Bloomsbury Square. There are broad steps on each side of the statue, their Portland stone now stained an aqueous green, and I like to sit beneath and between Fox’s feet, looking, with him, down Bedford Place and towards Russell Square. Like most fat men in statuary (and in life), Fox is seated for greater dignity; he is also swathed in a ...”

“... make the allusion plain: their columns open out into great branches. The idea goes both ways. Robert Frost wrote of his forest of ‘young fir balsams like a place/Where houses all are churches and have spires’. As god is to man, Friedrich seems to say, so man is to nature: we are the ones who shape it, who isolate and set off its beauty. But the ...”