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“... conditions; and to invoke a right is to suppose that there’s a plausible authority which can grant or affirm the right. There is no doubt that public feelings on the matter run high (at the time he was writing, in the late 1970s, very high), and these have to be acknowledged. But abortion is not a public act; even if it offends, it does not do so in the ...”

“... As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer ...”

“... Mickey at story meetings’; until 1946 Disney also voiced him, in falsetto. In another new Life, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, the studio head is seen by animators acting out ‘how a Chinese turtle should dance’, or doing ‘any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything – he all of a sudden was a valet.’ One such episode was burned in ...”

“... Cyber and television jihad are parts of the war that the former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer believes bin Laden is winning. Scheuer, whose Cassandra-isms as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit went unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations before 2001, is still trying to warn America. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘should be surprised ...”

“... January 1789, when it caused a sensation. When one reads it now, in this excellent new edition by Michael Sonenscher, where it appears for the first time in English alongside the other pamphlets Sieyès wrote in 1788, it is still easy to see why. It is not a beautiful or polished piece of writing, it is poorly organised and it is probably too long for what it ...”

“... for plenty of ideologically loaded human rights. In a recent issue of the Israel Law Review, Michael Mandel quotes a speech made by Palmiro Togliatti, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, in the Constituent Assembly charged with designing the new legal order: All these provisions are inspired by fear: it is feared that tomorrow there could be a ...”

“... administration of housing benefit – and an annual block transfer known as the Revenue Support Grant. The rest is raised locally, from council tax receipts (their size depending on the value of property in the area), rents, charges and fees (parking tickets, library fines, gym memberships) and 50 per cent of the rates levied on local businesses. Soon after ...”

“... in company.Whereupon Arnold makes Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ keep company with Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’.There are many moments in For Every Sin when the prose loses its equipoise, and settles as mannerism. Well-managed, and well-mannered, never inept but often unapt. Such lapses, in a novel where the protagonist finally succumbs to the strain of it ...”

“... one of the most dishonest of all modern literary forms, the official letter applying for a travel grant – for Greece in this instance. It is painful to discover that Cordier’s sculptures are connected with both colonial politics and the scientific investigation of race, which now seems so disreputable, just as it is pleasing to find that Benoist’s ...”

“... demonstrating the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in policy from war to peace after 1629. He ignores the two peace treaties of 1630, and the Goa treaty of 1635, which marked a new turn in foreign and trading ...”

“... Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil LaBute, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier. But it’s Nelson’s thoughts about the stuff that flickers in the middle that bears most directly on writers of memoir. The idea, for example, that if we can see the artist is suffering, that makes it OK that the artist is making ...”

“... The 1930s, the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by that definition, perhaps the 1930s didn’t really end until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet launched his coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, and Allende committed suicide in the national palace ...”

“... routine matter ever since the Act of Union for Parliament to renew each year the modest government grant to the Catholic seminary of St Patrick’s, Maynooth, a few miles from Dublin. Why should Gladstone so violently object to the 1838 renewal? Why did he change his mind and vote for renewal in 1842? Why, above all, having caved in, did he then resign on the ...”

“... critic should notice that these are distinctive, that most of Milton is not like this at all. Michael Watkins in an unpublished thesis observes that Fish makes Milton sound exactly like George Herbert, and of course he is nothing like George Herbert. Herbert’s central theology is thoroughly Calvinist; he accepts the depravity of man. Milton famously ...”

“... and became a regular editor on the paper. Then, with Ionescu’s help, he got a Government grant to pursue his law studies in Paris. By the time he returned, in 1931, Romanian politics had become more contentious. Previously, it had mostly been about gaining access to the public trough, but now a postwar generation, puerile, violent, romantic, shifted ...”