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“... from Jefferson’s speeches to the rhetoric of abolitionism; even ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ may glance at an earlier line from the poem, about ‘starr’d and spangled courts’. In England, the Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus reached ordinary readers in a broadsheet version distributed free by the Society for Constitutional Information (it purged the ...”

“... disregard for the rule of international law. He quotes General Mike Jackson, who toured Basra in May 2003 after the victory over Saddam. ‘It is startlingly apparent,’ Jackson reported to London, ‘that we are not delivering that which was deemed to be promised and is expected.’ Jackson was encouraged to keep his concerns to himself, since this was ...”

“... dismissed (which is pretty much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing ...”

“... affair. One of the reasons for this apparent willingness to subordinate her own career for so long may be that Hillary Clinton seems by instinct to be more of an administrator, an enabler and a mobiliser than a politician who is driven by a distinctive policy agenda. The criticism most often levelled against her by pundits and voters in America is that she is ...”

“... a national conciliator and broker of industrial peace. In 1957 his chief ally in the Labour Party, Richard Crossman, complained in his diary that Wilson ‘grows fatter, more complacent and more evasive each time you meet him’ – and then resolved to make him prime minister. Even Wilson’s enemies found it difficult to pin down precisely what it was they ...”

“... uses the phrase in a more nuanced way. His subtitle points to the fact that while Harold Godwinson may have been ‘the last English king’ (actually he was half-Danish), and possibly the ‘last of the Saxon kings’ (though that is just Bulwer-Lytton deflecting the shame of defeat away from England), unlike his predecessor, Edward the Confessor, he had no ...”

“... that, along with the regretted scholastic exchanges, passionate love letters went up in smoke. It may simply have been more about those bears.This isn’t the only bonfire to have made Wade’s task more difficult. When the economic historian Eileen Power died in 1940, her sisters burned most of her personal papers. It is impossible to know whether this was a ...”

“... a collection of thousands of eye-witness accounts covering five hundred years of performance. It may be taken either as an erudite coffee-table book or a major research tool, saving countless hours of fractured looking on the internet; either way, it is full of diverting detail. In 1707, Thomas Brown wrote that some of the singing men at St Paul’s ...”

“... it’s primarily a commodity, culture becomes autonomous. Deprived of its traditional features, it may curve back on itself, taking itself as its own raison d’être in the manner of some modernist art; it is also free to serve as critique on a sizeable scale for the first time. The miseries of commodification are also an enthralling moment of ...”

“... unique educational value. Evensong has become more of a cultural icon than a religious event. As Richard Dawkins, no theist, put it, ‘I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.’But Stanford hadn’t set out to be only a church music composer. He had ...”

“... puts this stale little homily in the mouth of the Duke of Norfolk in the ridiculous first scene of Richard II where two young lords spoiling for a fight, Norfolk and Bolingbroke, swagger before their monarch. No one explains the reason for their quarrel. Norfolk, rather like some of Mr Carter-Ruck’s clients, seems to be an over-sensitive upper-class ...”

“... have been so alert to the medium’s cool tricking of the real and the abstract. Badlands may be the most serene film he ever made. A philosopher might have stopped then and there. But he was tickled by the idea of life as a moviemaker.His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), was more flagrantly beautiful and even more widely admired. It’s the story of ...”

“... after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its ...”

“... of the convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguires resulted in the appointment of Sir John May’s inquiry, which was in part stalled by the prosecution of four of the police officers involved in the case. But when in 1991, piling Pelion on Ossa, the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of the Birmingham Six, the Government was ready the same day ...”

“... More generally, there is the literature on the corruption of the innocent which takes its cue from Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and which is apt to picture every form of mass consumption as degenerate. Here – as in the writings of Jeremy Seabrook – it is the prosperity of the working class, rather than, or as well as, the poverty, which is the ...”