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“... show that the figure and the Don Carlos legend illustrate our broader fascination with trying to grant life to inanimate matter: ‘The monk models in votive intercession or sympathetic repair everything the physicians were trying to accomplish: to prevent the ebbing of life from the body, to rewind its vital spring, to put the prince back on his feet so ...”

“... He speaks as if he had abolished differences, not just the particular distinction. Even if we grant the thesis that the rapist, the bank robber, the judge, the legislator and the soldier on Tiananmen Square are all exercising force or power, it does not follow that the force of law is simply indistinguishable from the force it opposes, still less that all ...”

“... echelons of the fashionable Geological Society. They also enabled him to negotiate a government grant to publish the Zoology of the Beagle voyage. A retrenching Whig ministry was persuaded to put up £1000, allowing the young Darwin to dispense his own patronage. He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like ...”

“... to publish a definitive, ten-volume edition of Burke’s correspondence, supervised by the late Thomas Copeland. And since 1981, the Clarendon Press has been publishing Burke’s writings and speeches under the overall editorship of Paul Langford, the first systematically new edition since that compiled between 1792 and 1827. No one reading these genuinely ...”

“... it is further from the immediacy of bloodshed and the living feel of death. Thus we are told that Grant, who conducted war on a ‘balance sheet’ of killing, ‘flinched from the sight of blood and could eat only overdone meat’. It all has to do with the victory of the new men over the old honour, of money over class, of the machine over nature. The ...”

“... wages which employers, seeing that they cannot increase prices very rapidly, will be unwilling to grant. Thus Friedman has always advocated a gradual disinflation rather than a short sharp shock. His reasoning lay behind the adoption in 1980 of the British Government’s Medium Term Financial Strategy. Under the MTFS the monetary targets were planned to fall ...”

“... skits, squibs, facetious or satirical articles, jokes, paid for at space rates. Such a poet as Thomas Hood had already squeezed a precarious living from writing or editing ‘comic annuals’, and Punch and its imitators bought the work of innumerable freelances whose hunger enabled them to summon up humour on demand. A third possible source of income was ...”

“... Unusual too in a moral philosopher, Williams did not seek to have the Last Word. Writing about Thomas Nagel’s book of that name, he couldn’t but agree that there comes a point at which we have to accept that to encourage thinking locally or ‘thickly’ about ethics, thinking about what the options are for us ‘now and around here’, rests on a ...”

“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”

“... Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera ...”

“... whose only comfort was the bouquet of wines maturing in their big oak casks. Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, a BBC man, was one of the correspondents in attendance, and described Alexander’s manner as that of a ‘headmaster disappointed at some misdemeanour in the Upper School’.He admitted that the Beachhead landing hadn’t gone as he had hoped: ‘We ...”

“... of Athens invites adaptation because it is already a collaboration – it was partly written by Thomas Middleton, who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play ...”

“... I took Donne’s greatness as axiomatic. I still enjoy much of Donne much of the time, but will grant more readily that Dryden and Johnson had a point: conspicuous cleverness is not always a good thing. It can go too far, and seem merely frivolous. There are moments, subjects and genres where it feels out of place. The usual advice – read a poet’s best ...”

“... Duke of Parma. A more immediate success was that otherwise inexplicable papal readiness to grant the untried Society its generous Bull of Foundation in 1540. There was back-up. Leonor de Mascarenhas, a strong-minded, cultured and celibate Portuguese noblewoman, was the much loved governess to Charles V’s two legitimate daughters and the future ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”