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“... Meredith, J.B. Priestley. Amis has something in common with all of them, and his conversational powers, transposed into the verbal clatter of the typewriter, are as formidable as theirs were as men of the pen. The hero of Take a girl like you was always more than prepared to let others have their verbal stint, trot out their hobby-horses: but was it his ...”

“... that object; ‘the disaster is the idea that there has to be an interface between our cognitive powers and the external world.’ Whereas the undisastrous alternative, according to Putnam, is the ‘direct’ or ‘commonsense’ realism about perception that he shares with such of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not ...”

“... British freedoms known as the First World War, involving as it did ‘arbitrary (governmental) powers that would have made the Stuarts blush’. State repression stretched beyond this into the class struggles of the interwar period, as the ancient law of sedition was brought back from the grave to censor and imprison Communists. The far right was allowed ...”

“... given up the special concessions Russia enjoyed in subjugated China along with other Western powers and Japan. Communist study circles did not of course discuss what Stalin made of Lenin’s promise to Russia’s ethnic nationalities, or how Asian Communists overturned Lenin’s facile equation – imperialism equals monopoly capitalism – when in the ...”

“... other remarkable versions of essentially the same tale: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,2 Thomas Keneally’s The Commonwealth of Thieves3 and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.4 The mystery of the stolen continent. Naturally, Australian readers know in advance who did it – and in a sense are still doing it. Newcomers took the country from the previous ...”

“... Could Henry VIII have friends? The pertinent anecdote is well known: he walked affectionately with Thomas More, an arm around his neck, but More told his son-in-law: ‘If my head would win him a castle in France … it would not fail to go.’ Charles Brandon fought in showy campaigns to recover those bits of France Henry thought he owned, so he must have ...”

“... traders’ India. White men happily took up hookahs, flowing dresses and local lovers. His father, Thomas Brooke, a prosperous High Court judge in the service of the East India Company, had a local mistress and an illegitimate child, for whom he provided in his will, and Mrs Brooke was herself almost certainly illegitimate and may have been Eurasian. ...”

“... things that I have seen I now can see no more’) confirmed and supported Wordsworth’s powers. The Immortality Ode has all the gusto of a celebration of his uniquely creative form of solipsism, whose powers of sympathy are as great as its powers of attracting love, or of ...”

“... joined hands with them against Painite radicalism. Since then, they had been bought off with token powers. Writing almost at the apogee of the 14th Earl of Home, Anderson saw aristocratic power (inflected through the House of Lords, the Church, the City, Oxbridge, and Metro politan culture) swanning on. Thompson has likewise stressed the subteranean sinews of ...”

“... of English literary documents have stayed convicted. In two famous cases, those of the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of ...”

“... London. They had succeeded in ending three decades of cold and hot war between Reformed Protestant powers and the Spanish Habsburgs, confirming in the process the independence of the Protestant Northern Netherlands, and offering the possibility that Roman Catholicism might not always be seen as the inevitable enemy of the Elizabethan way of ...”

“... had died. But he was sharing a condo with a woman friend who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the first year of his widowhood, he sat in his chair, heartsore, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then he started going out with ...”

“... press and leading Southern politicians to assert that they were ‘pawns in the hands of Communist powers that be’. It was a charge that carried real punch in the atmosphere of the Cold War. The deprecation of the Riders’ motives and efficacy was not just a Southern conceit. New York-based Westbrook Pegler, the country’s leading conservative ...”

“... the benefits of slave ownership and colonialism, could achieve the virtues of individual liberty. Thomas Friedman’s recommendations to the world’s stragglers included the ‘values of hard work, thrift, honesty, patience and tenacity’, as well as ‘export-oriented free market strategies based on privatisation of state companies, deregulation of ...”

“... in our world. I didn’t find it in yesterday’s newspaper, though. The historian Marcel Thomas uses it in his remarkable book, published in 1989, on Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the man who was the spy that Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t. Thomas is thinking of Esterhazy’s acquittal in 1898. Why would a ...”