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“... of a family history in which successive generations are debilitated by a legacy of abuse. Rodney Hall tells of a convict at large in New South Wales in 1838, caught up in larger, even more powerful cycles of captivity and exploitation, until he finds temporary sanctuary with an Aboriginal tribe and becomes ‘the very centre of their circle’. Both novels ...”

“... Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before and since, owes its popularity to the fact that ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ is still for many ...”

“... best as figures of some social value and at worst as licentious rogues. The bishop and philosopher John of Salisbury argued in the 12th century that when it came to ‘actors and mimes, clowns and prostitutes, pimps and similar prodigal men’, the ideal prince ‘ought rather to exterminate than to encourage’ them. In a penitential composed around 1216, the ...”

“... 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12.8) instead.* I was 17 years old when I started. I was from Essex. I’d ...”

“... already famous piece was flat, stale, unreal, unconfident, artificial, class-ridden. And that no doubt was the case; although, as Christopher Innes pointed out in his chapter on Rattigan in Modern British Drama 1890-1990, the two situation comedies are very similar. Of course, Osborne’s style of making a fuss was a new thing in the theatre; Rattigan’s ...”

“... many children were born – and so are Horace, Charles Kingsley, Dryden, Tennyson – Locksley Hall bursts into new ebullience, together with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And then, per contra, we have some ingenious and penetrating little lyric about the oddities of life, in a style that Gay or Prior would recognise. The chancellor’s nightmare song ...”

“... in the saying’ – but not here, not now, before this stranger with his simple scripts. There is no easy way to say what he knows to be true about his father, for ‘his mind wasn’t his own, his history was mostly fake.’ So he settles for a lie. For the moment – in his own damaged and shamed condition – that is the best he can do. Seven years after ...”

“... saviour of the realm. Richard, hurrying home, found himself deserted in mid-Wales and faced with no alternative to putting himself in his cousin’s power. With Richard his virtual prisoner, and satisfied that those who had welcomed him would go along with the next step, Henry set about preparing to supplant the king. On 30 September, before the assembled ...”

“... of mistresses, champagne, gambling and entertaining’. He was best known for his magazine John Bull. Launched in 1906 following Bottomley’s election as the Liberal MP for Hackney South, it specialised in a leaden patriotism. The French were ‘the Foul French’; the Labour leader Keir Hardie was ‘Kur’ Hardie; Britain’s wartime opponents were ...”

“... photofacsimile of Domesday Book was advertised by Publications Alecto. Meanwhile, in the Great Hall at Winchester, the Phillimore edition was exhibited, and the Alecto facsimile again advertised, in the very place where the original Domesday Book was in hand in 1086.* The impending 1986 celebrations might well have prompted the publication of the second ...”

“... shows a low-ceilinged vaulted chamber, based on the Nazi architect Wilhelm Kreis’s 1939 memorial hall for German soldiers. The charred walls and glowering atmosphere of Kiefer’s version, and above all the inscribed ‘Sulamith’ show that far from being a Nazi Valhalla this is a Holocaust memorial. The ‘ashen-haired’ Sulamith and the ...”

“... her ‘misfortune to suffer very great mischiefs from the assistance of architects’; Sir John Cope, of Bramshill, whose ‘apartments are so vastly spacious that one generally sees Sir John toward the winter put on his hat to go from one room to another’; John Mytton, of ...”

“... them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil ...”

“... splendidly atmospheric photographs by Roger Mayne, made me realise that the coffee house was by no means the unalloyed disaster I – as someone deeply involved in the project – have always assumed. It lasted only four years and financial disaster was narrowly averted after it closed in 1962, but like many socialist undertakings before and since it was a ...”

“... A surprising charge: but, on reflection, surprisingly accurate. Waugh, in his black style, had no more humour than P.G. Wodehouse in his rosy style. Waugh deeply admired Wodehouse, and read and re-read him all his working life. But humour in fiction is about an interest in real people, and Waugh had no such ...”