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“... forces. What we’re seeing in Cairo is both new and old: not an Islamist revolt but a broad-based social movement bridging the secular-religious divide, a 21st-century version of the Arab nationalism that had for many years seemed a spent force. And though the Egyptian protests have found a provisional figurehead in Mohammed ElBaradei, the ...”

“... sketches of recent Labour history, with amusing ruminations on Brown’s resemblance to both Richard Nixon and Bela Lugosi and a painfully accurate description of his stony smile: ‘Brown’s grin was fixed, as always, as a grimace; there was some gurning, a movement that suggested chewing, the clearing of a shred of tomato skin maybe from in front of ...”

“... his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in 1495, his Treason Act, which recognised that it was ‘ayenst all lawes reason and gode conscience’ to penalise subjects for treason that consisted purely of loyalty to the eventual loser. It remains in force. In 1662 it was ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... not alone in finding Banks a study in vanity: an intellectual flea Hopping on Science’s broad, bony back. Although Banks did much to promote the international image of the Royal Society during his 42-year tenure as its President, he seems incorrectly to have understood the underlying forces encouraging specialisation. He supported the formation of ...”

“... on sources: ‘masterly’, ‘magnificent’ and ‘magisterial’ are among his adjectives for a broad and disparate assembly of scholars, from Robert Tucker, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch to Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest. His reading in secondary sources is broad, and ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”

“... written only just before Julius Caesar). Kermode suggests that the prison scene at the end of Richard II marks a stage in the emergence of characters who think in verse, and shows ‘signs of a language formidably changing to meet greater challenges’, and that in Henry IV Shakespeare comes to understand and develop the potential of prose. But if ...”

“... Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as well as a number of theologians and religious controversialists, of writers on science and medicine and so on, whose names were then ...”

“... hitherto dismissed. He pays no attention to Trilling and blessedly little to Spender. He follows Richard Hillary’s much-mentioned The Last Enemy to Mary and Richard (1988), a collection of love letters between Hillary and Mary Booker edited by Michael Burn, later to become Mary’s husband; this leads him to Burn’s own ...”

“... have tended to achieve popular success by side-stepping party politics and establishing a broad base of support, not only across the parties, but from people who don’t think of themselves as having a political affiliation at all. Richard Daley Jr, Mayor of Chicago and son of ...”

“... Cambridge for stealing library books; her stepmother was violent and tyrannical; her half-brother Richard was shipped off to India for some unnamed crime; her brother-in-law Molesworth Phillips was a bullying and unfaithful husband; her elder brother James had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. It sounds like a Mrs Radcliffe family in a castle ...”

“... it also a work of reference. This approach has many virtues. It strikes a good balance between broad analysis and particular conditions, and in examining all belligerent countries it highlights similarities and differences. It is no mere encyclopedic compilation: interest is sustained and understanding advanced because the information is everywhere placed ...”

“... Martha Nussbaum, with her Sixties sensibilities, responded to a New York Times op-ed article by Richard Rorty, a relatively senior philosopher who identifies with the Old Left of the Forties. Rorty had urged young Americans, especially Leftists, to cease denigrating the value of patriotism and take seriously the ‘emotion of national pride’ as essential ...”