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“... of the marriage was raised in Parliament, the Prince of Wales denied it even to his friend Fox who, believing him, stood up in the Commons and denied it too. Not surprisingly Mrs Fitzherbert was very cross and though she forgave the Prince she never forgave Fox who, in turn, found it hard to forgive the Prince. All ...”

“... the history of France in the last century is embodied in the strange trinity of Philippe Pétain, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. Pétain, born in 1856, was old enough to remember the humiliation of France at the hands of Prussia in 1870, and like other French officers of his period, spent his entire military career in anticipation of what he ...”

“... of misremembering. Nineteenth and 20th-century attempts to frame the landscape, in the manner of Fox Talbot, Pitt Rivers or Edward Thomas, are viewed with suspicion. Their pastoral fantasies – expressed in photography, archaeology or poetry – become a mark of distance and loss. In the closing pages, Thorpe plays a postmodern trick, suddenly introducing a ...”

“... other, literally, in an attempt to describe him. ‘The chairman, as he likes to be called,’ Charles McCabe wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘looks like your genial host at the neighbourhood delicatessen.’ Dorothy Kilgallen, who was earlier seen almost to have caused an international incident by ridiculing Mrs Khrushchev’s choice of evening ...”

“... quotes a telling remark, made during Renoir’s early years at what he called Fifteenth-Century Fox: ‘I am afraid of having lost all enthusiasm for my profession, or rather, it’s that the métier of cinema has become too old, too organised, too immobile ...’ Darryl Zanuck, then head of Fox, reciprocated by ...”

“... Commune, then aestheticised as a capital of ruins. A picture of the Ministry of Finance, taken by Charles Soulier in May 1871, shows an archway bulging with shattered bricks that spill into the street, the upper windows framing clear sky; on the wall, a handbill advertising a concert has had its centre ripped out, as though punctured by a bomb. At this point ...”

“... to Robespierre, Danton or Marat.’ Four years later the same journal warned, in terms drawn from Fox, that while ‘the doctrine of resistance’ was to be commended for having ‘placed the present Royal family on the throne of these kingdoms, it is a doctrine more fit to be inculcated on princes, than rashly instilled into the people.’ The aristocratic ...”

“... be that Britain’s way of opening up the country – with gunboats – was counter-productive. Charles Elliot, a far gentler envoy than Pottinger, which is why Palmerston eventually sacked him, thought it would have been (in Lovell’s paraphrase) ‘better for the long term to bank goodwill than hard cash’. In the very long term this has turned out to ...”

“... QuartetThe​ image on the front of Late Fragments is a portrait taken by the Belgian photographer Charles Neyt in 1864. Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just ...”

“... is more drawn to an earlier episode in Paris two months earlier. The proclivities of King Charles IX were gratified at a great feast marked by ‘an exceptionally vile pièce de resistance in which a bag full of live cats and a fox was suspended thirty feet up over a huge bonfire, until the flames pulled the ...”

“... who called her “a piquant mixture between a milkmaid and a lady” – to the elegant Sir Charles Bunbury, formerly the husband of the Lady Sarah Lennox with whom George III had been so much in love before duty forced him to marry his German queen.’ There’s also a Victorianism of outlook, in assertions such as one to the effect that Mrs ...”

“... his collection in 1827. Grant arrived in London that year from Edinburgh, where he had taught Charles Darwin and studied marine invertebrates with him in the Firth of Forth. All 12 of Grant’s brothers joined the navy or worked for the East India Company; he stayed closer to home, becoming a founding professor of the University of London, and the first ...”

“... the former and 28.7 per cent of the latter were killed. The death rate in bombers was exceptional. Charles Whiting, in his ’45: The Final Drive from the Rhine to the Baltic, provides repulsive detail which makes such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of ...”

“... or much maligned royal statesman?’ Brooke’s near hagiography has a foreword by Prince Charles, whom he befriended in the Royal Archives at Windsor: ‘We both agreed that George III had been unfairly maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an ...”

“... far greater threat than a sunburn.’ They could have picked John Kasich, a former Congressman and Fox News host, currently governor of Ohio. Known throughout his career as a phlegmatic and abusive man, widely disliked in Congress, he underwent an image makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ‘prince of light and hope’ and ...”