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“... upper stratum’. Capitalist and romantic utopian, man of action and wouldbe philosopher-king, bon viveur and advocate of austerity, Rathenau is perhaps the most contradictory figure in this book. A key organiser of German raw materials in the First World War, and attacked by the Allies as the despoiler of Belgium, Rathenau became a postwar symbol of ...”

“... of a less prestigious medical team hastily assembled by the Capucin exorcists, neither the King’s physicians nor he himself seem to have felt the slightest doubt that Marthe was a fraud being used for political ends. Professor Walker’s discussion of the surrounding circumstances only strengthens this withering diagnosis. He is particularly ...”

“... detailed Bellow-surrogate). Home is Chicago. The year is uncertain: there are mentions of Carter, Margaret Thatcher, but also of Entebbe, Cambodia. The Dean has come to Bucharest with his Rumanian wife Minna, a distinguished astronomer. Minna’s mother Valeria is dying. ‘Corde had come to give support.’ He is consciously testing his reserves as a good ...”

“... written down over the past seven centuries, than the ‘Victorian coronation of Shakespeare as the King of Poets’. Willinsky devotes two chapters to the OED as ‘Shakespeare’s Dictionary’. Elsewhere he notes the exclusion of the vernacular, the dialects of business, trade, music-hall, barrack-room, bar-room and those professional discourses not ...”

“... the Party could make to the pure monarchical model, for there was no doubt that the leader, like a king, was not responsible to his subjects. Their duty was to follow him but he had no duty to represent them. What no one could forget was the war leadership of Pitt, Lloyd George and Churchill when the fate of the country hung entirely on the character of the ...”

“... the Protestant Irish, landowners, protectionists, the City, much of the Church of England and King George V. No Labour Government, not even Attlee’s, faced such a coalition. There was, of course, an unintended element to this; but it was the inevitable outcome of a strategy which originated with Gladstone and was continued by his successors: that you ...”

“... work; after a year of living hand to mouth in hotels and sublets, an old and wealthy friend, Margaret De Silver, started a trust fund to save them from destitution. Not long after Gousha’s death, Powell wrote in her diary: ‘Old retired couples … are each other’s prisoners, as Joe was mine and I was his. Lovers become prisoners, eventually needing ...”

“... Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine works of fiction, only The Bear Boy – published in America as Heir to the ...”

“... to fight the war declared with such bureaucratic precision some ten days later. As it turned out, Margaret Thatcher didn’t bother to declare war in 1982 so Sir Gerald’s advice wasn’t required. Nor was war declared against Iraq in 1991 or 1998 or even in the Balkans in 1999. This is not because the executive has any anxieties about the Royal Prerogative ...”

“... Ong on subway graffiti, and the section opens with a splendidly passionate and ambitious piece by Margaret Doody on the revision of the hymnal used by Princeton University Chapel, a booklet called ‘Inconclusive Language Hymns’ which is produced by the First Congregational Church. From here, Doody strikes out boldly into territory of wide aesthetic and ...”

“... courtier, eager to win honour and wealth not available in the Basque country by service in the king of Spain’s entourage. Once Loyola’s plans for the Society of Jesus took shape, they were made possible by his courtier’s sense of how to charm and persuade the powerful to look favourably on his vision: not least his skill in influencing noble ladies ...”

“... for once, rather seriously and ‘knowingly’. 25 October 1930. Emerson says: ‘Today is a King in disguise.’ When I’m with Sieg there is nothing in disguise. I do miss him – but I’m better alone. He sent a message through his doctor that, since Sassoon’s last visit, his feelings towards him were not what they had once been: Sassoon upset ...”

“... for instance, which we discover in ourselves when we ask why we find it hard not to smile at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic illustrations to the Idylls of the King. Historians of photography inform us that photographers, having vainly endeavoured to imitate paintings in order to be artistic, came eventually to see ...”

“... quoted in Miss Fane in India were written to her aunt in England. She finds the future Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer, ‘a little, ugly, underbred-looking thing’; the talkative Misses Eden, Emily and Frances, are old and ugly and stink like polecats. There is a long tedious dinner at the Babington Macaulays, but the host escapes personal ...”

“... of setting or mood; as with other novels which assimilate some crucial text (‘Crusoe, her King Charles’s head’), and thereby gain the freedom to shift away from straightforward narration, certain kinds of verisimilitude seem not greatly to the point. Jane Gardam, for instance, makes no bones about endowing her under-age heroine with an unnatural ...”