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“... of self-love put forward by Condillac and Helvétius and naturalised into England by Adam Smith and Bentham. Hazlitt raged against reaction and tyranny in England, but the intellectual roots of what he raged against were French, not English. Even the group which welcomed 1789 most warmly, the politically active ministers of the Dissenting ...”

“... full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.’ Herbert Smith, President of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, told a wages inquiry in 1924 that in the previous year 212,256 men received injuries disabling them for more than seven days, and in addition 1,297 were fatally injured. These figures mean ...”

“... and other scientists, who maintained that if a phenomenon was inexplicable it did not exist, and drew on experience and intuition. Her author, one Horace Smith, had based his novel partly on his own encounters with mesmerism, and probably also on the famous case of the writer Harriet Martineau. Even his modest invalid knew ...”

“... have been a milliner’s assistant ... or a poorly paid governess hurrying to her pupils. As I drew near the pavement the girl looked up and I all but sat flat down in the road. For the first and only time in my life I beheld perfect beauty. The face was that of the lost Venus of Praxiteles, and of all the copies handed down to us must have been ...”

“... this and that and little income tax, They probably earn seven times as much As poor old Grosvenor-Smith. But who will grudge Them this, their wild spontaneous holiday? The morning paddle, then the mystery tour By motor-coach inland this afternoon. For that old mother what a happy time! This can be taken as either straight or not straight, but either way it ...”

“... and caution: but in Britain he has sometimes been received with a suspicious snort. Martin Seymour-Smith writes in his useful guide, Novels and Novelists, that ‘The Recognitions, a complex novel about forgery and illusion, was found by most critics to be impenetrable and possibly pretentious.’ Now that The Recognitions of 1955 and JR of 1975 are being ...”

“... Crazy Cock, Miller depicts the desperation that overtook him when his second wife, June Mansfield Smith, skipped to Europe in 1927 with her lesbian lover Jean Kronski, obliging a broke and humiliated 36-year-old Miller to move back in with his parents in Brooklyn and take a non-writing job. He had yet to set up house in Paris: Crazy Cock is his poorly done ...”

“... of implying that a home visit in old age from Kurt Cobain or a graveside serenade from Patti Smith has the same cultural importance as the writing of Nova Express and The Wild Boys. Burroughs’s actual achievement seems incidental to the glitzy mythologising of his remaining intimates, though still a bone of contention gnawed by literati. Hardly ...”

“... pornography of the written word. But it is clear enough that, as Harrow’s tradition of beating drew to a close, the ethics of writing (as well as of practice) entered the controversy. Tyerman casts his eye equally effectively on other, sometimes awkward aspects of Harrow’s history. His story of low-level, endemic racism and anti-semitism in the school up ...”

“... one that he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe dreamed in vain of driving out ...”

“... by her. Particularly by her claim that she didn’t see the point of making things up: that she drew on her family and childhood for her early novels and historical data for her later work. He overdoes it. He often seems to be fighting an imaginary adversary: a reader who thinks that fiction is a code, who opens a novel and gets cross if an autobiography ...”

“... afford to live in big cities like London and New York. But the world that incubated Russell, and drew out all the snaking tendrils of his offbeat eclecticism, is long gone. Lofts once inhabited by breadline artists, musicians and filmmakers are now the sole preserve of billionaires. The cross-pollination that allowed Russell to switch between different ...”

“... American television, reaching unprecedented numbers of viewers. According to Major-General Perry Smith in How CNN fought the war, CNN’s public relations office estimated that one billion people in 108 nations watched their coverage of the Gulf War. The Kennedy assassination drew transfixed viewers into an instant ...”

“... and gave her name to the modified milk bottle in which donated blood was stored. Another, Charles Drew, Columbia’s first African American medical graduate, built the infrastructure for plasma collection in the US for shipment to the various theatres of war. At a time when black blood was acceptable only when specifically labelled pint by pint, and was ...”

“... Mellor and Gerald Kaufman (described by Isaacs as possessing ‘toxic conceitedness’) to Chris Smith were not amused. How, people asked, was the ‘income requirement’ of the Arts Council’s most voracious client arrived at? Were the singers’ fees not excessive, did the stage crews not live the life of Riley? A succession of investigations by ...”