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“... was probably the nature of the thumb-sized toy encountered in 1267 by the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, who, with forgivable exaggeration, recorded a noise ‘exceeding the roar of strong thunder and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning’. Paper could also be wrapped around canvas compartments to add stages to a firework’s incandescent ...”

“... later Elizabethan churchmen had viewed the Presbyterian threat and the prospect of a Scottish king as head of the Church of England, but there was less need for nerves after 1604, when the esteem of bishops seems to have risen among the laity. The troubled Parliaments of the 1620s produced no challenge to the episcopal office. If the term ...”

“... spirits which they didn’t know how to use in moderation. ‘Why don’t you write to your great King,’ one of the natives said, ‘that he prohibit these beverages from being brought in, since they kill us?’ The Jesuit replied that the French needed these drinks in order to face the oceanic voyages and incredible cold of these regions. ‘Then make it ...”

“... of internecine Christian theological dispute. All this, one might expect from the cofounder (with Roger Scruton) of the Conservative Philosophy Group. But Casey is not only conservative (and, besides, presents the interesting spectacle of a man who has been getting steadily less conservative with age). He was educated at a provincial English grammar school by ...”

“... Among the new recruits, he recalled, there was a strong feeling that people ‘like the deposed King and Mrs Simpson’ had deceived the public about Nazism, encouraging them to see it as a bulwark against Bolshevism and depicting the greatest evil as another war with Germany. This naturally led to a counter, pro-Russian feeling, which has since been ...”

“... made it necessary for him to have a pseudonym or two at his disposal, and so we find ‘Captain King’ issuing instructions to his agents and arranging assignations in seedy hotels. Masters resorts to cautious speculation when the facts can’t be ascertained, showing, for example, an impossible familiarity with his subject’s state of mind at 14. This ...”

“... cards. Only the last group had any direct connection to the Communist Party of Great Britain in King Street, and they – on the whole – were the least likely to ‘pass through the looking-glass’ and become Comintern agents whose first duty was to conceal their beliefs. Nothing is more revealing than Straight’s own admission that, although he was ...”

“... intellectual adviser to the Communist Party, then a Trotskyist, and was a perpetual critic of God, King and Empire in his public utterances. (The pronouncements which led to attempts being made to remove him from his professorship were always in student societies or public forums; his lectures were austere.) What was he doing as a staunch defender of a ...”

“... two. In February, a relatively benign one, which brought to a sudden end the reign of the last king, Louis-Philippe, and sent him into exile (by cab, so rumour had it). Then, in June, the new republican administration having quickly proved too pussy-footing in its reforms for those on the left, a more violent and widespread workers’ uprising ...”

“... a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s early novels are excellent – especially Ask the Dust, which does indeed make good on at least some of the comparisons listed above. The narrator is Arturo Bandini, a young man from a poor Italian family who has moved ...”

“... about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed Aslan’s ...”

“... civilisation, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal.’ In The Language of George Orwell (1995), Roger Fowler went into a good deal of detail concerning the ‘authoritarian force’ of the generalisations (many of them sustained by a generic ‘one’) on which the political writing relies. Woloch does not engage fully with this less sanguine ...”

“... gang up on their targets. Phillips details the case of a Californian teenager called Chelsea King, who was raped and murdered in February 2010. Her relatives were treated as fair game, and supportive strangers who tried to intervene were themselves tracked down and hounded. RIP trolling treats grief as an exploitable state. It isn’t that the trolls ...”

“... at Çayönü in Turkey. A mass of bodies, primarily infants, are currently being excavated by Roger and Wendy Matthews of the University of Reading from a single building at the early Neolithic site of Bestansur in northern Iraq. Signs of multiple burials have been found below house floors in late Neolithic sites throughout the region. Many Neolithic ...”