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“... I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... of Mylapore took me to Little Mount, a rocky hillock rising from the coastal plain, where the saint spent his last days in a cave; and then on inland to the larger St Thomas’s Mount, where I climbed the 134 steps to the little white shrine on the summit which marks the site of his martyrdom, speared to death by soldiers under the orders of a hostile ...”

“... that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by Duveen himself): the conservative decorator and the conservative architect. They provided appropriate settings for Bellini and Botticelli among the tapestries and ...”

“... according to friends, ‘the international champion in the Wife-of-Writer Competition’, ‘the Saint Sebastian of wives’. The marriage and Vladimir’s artistic greatness, as they both perceived it, was the only real country to which either of them belonged once each had been geographically exiled. Their son, Dmitri, was given residential rights, though ...”

“... nymphet Anne Howard (by now Lady Sylvius). This presents Margaret Godolphin née Blagge as a saint, who sought out Communion each week, posted admonitory notes to herself around her chamber to think fine thoughts and act fine deeds, and who prayed with Evelyn, without Evelyn and for Evelyn. After the first publication of the Life in 1847 Margaret ...”

“... her early novels and, according to Stannard, ‘told his children to protect her because she was a saint’. Posh Catholics, Tory anarchists and American anglophiles of related leanings still make up part of her constituency, and less astringent productions like A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), plus memories of Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, gave rise to a ...”

“... the Hills, though their book, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends, contributes to the myth of Saint Jane as surely as Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, because they don’t patronise Austen. They are Janeites, as surely as Austen-Leigh is not. The growing nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial England was reflected in their creation of a world between fact and ...”

“... diehard anti-Home Rulers appeared to flirt with insurrection and civil war. The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, declared in a speech at Blenheim in 1912 that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’. The Curragh Mutiny and Larne gun-running incident in the spring of 1914 showed ...”

“... his powers to a ‘corpse’, a ‘ghost’, a stranded ‘wreck’. An apter representation was Saint-Gaudens’s caricature of him on a bronze medallion, the domed head in profile attached to the body of a bristling porcupine. ‘My dispute, or rather my defence against self-criticism,’ Adams wrote to Barrett Wendell in 1909, ‘is that our failures are ...”

“... years later lamented the loss of Franklin’s 1845 expedition – a ‘sad subject’ which, as Andrew Lambert has shown, owed as much to Sabine’s magnetic crusade as it did to the quest for the Northwest Passage. By 1860, Faraday was coming, as these letters reveal and as he baldly acknowledged, to the end of his career. Though his physical health ...”

“... who profited from the existing order and those on whom its burden chiefly fell’. His book on Andrew Jackson tried to explain why he was not simply the champion of white frontiersmen (one reason his portrait is back up in the Trump White House), but, more important, fought on behalf of downtrodden men in the eastern cities against a National Bank that had ...”

“... childhood was happy and ordinary’) is part of a popularising mission. He wants to make Wallace a saint: ‘This hopeful, hurtful, energetic, angry, despairing, optimistic, shy product of the American Midwest,’ he writes in the preface to the UK edition, ‘for all the dark moments of his life, never stopped being a purer version of ourselves.’ But it’s ...”

“... this partakes at once of municipal worthy, folk hero, national icon, monarch, pagan god, Catholic saint and Messiah. (The last analogy is made all but inescapable by the name of Shakespeare’s mother, and even as sober an account of his life as Honan’s sounds at times like a Victorian carol: ‘In early life he must have been the focus of Mary’s very ...”

“... call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia Tribune in 1966, brought the listener ‘into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat ...”

“... both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual fact, despite our thoughts and our recovery from our thoughts, in the early 1970s British farming was in a pretty good state. J.G.S. and Frances Donaldson’s Farming in Britain Today, published around this ...”