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“... living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... the idea of a seat, and appropriate a whole country to the mansion’, as his contemporary Thomas Whately put it. Brown was attacked as a result, directly by Cowper in The Task and implicitly by Goldsmith in The Deserted Village. Yet his life also tells the opposite story of the considerable social mobility available to the educated Georgian ...”

“... he reveals his name, and even this arch literary empiricist curiously insists that his first name, Thomas (rather than his surname), is the real sign that he is a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all ...”

“... them, in a racist dramaturgy that produces tragic destruction.Twelfth Night’s other neighbour is Thomas More, the probably unperformed manuscript play by many hands on which more than one theatre company seems to have worked, fitfully, over several years. John Jowett’s Arden edition brilliantly re-dated the play from the 1590s to 1600-04, with Hand ...”

“... the mid-1730s lobbied theatre managements to stage more Shakespeare; she had also encouraged Sir Thomas Hanmer, a former Speaker of the House of Commons, to prepare the Oxford edition of Shakespeare published in 1744, with a picture of the Westminster Abbey statue as a frontispiece. Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the ...”

“... in the back and three times in the head. A pathologist later agreed that the third IRA member Sean Savage had been ‘riddled with bullets’ in what looked like a ‘frenzied attack’. He was hit 16 times, with a number of bullets entering his head while he lay on the ground. Witnesses to the shootings of Farrell and McCann also claimed they had been shot ...”

“... baneful. But there can be no mistaking his enormous gift, especially in phrasing and diction (‘a savage servility/slides by on grease’), not to mention the matchless force and aptness of his descriptive language. Some of his poems are so indelibly part of the poetic voice of his era that, however much one might disapprove of him, to discount his importance ...”

“... Rutherford’s gathering of previously unpublished or uncollected early poems, and Professor Thomas Pinney’s selection from the early journalism: special reports, feature articles, social notes, reviews and comic sketches written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette between 1884 and 1888. Both editors acknowledge the rawness of the work they have ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... the benefits of slave ownership and colonialism, could achieve the virtues of individual liberty. Thomas Friedman’s recommendations to the world’s stragglers included the ‘values of hard work, thrift, honesty, patience and tenacity’, as well as ‘export-oriented free market strategies based on privatisation of state companies, deregulation of ...”

“... to Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from ...”

“... John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about it, though, was the way it left the ...”

“... to a summary halt by the heavy-handed intervention of the Inkatha feudal boss of nearby Lindelani, Thomas Shabalala. Shabalala is a classic figure of squatter life – the shacklord who takes rent or tribute from his subjects, providing them in return with law and order enforced by his own impi of strong-arm men. Thanks to Shabalala, Lindelani is a peaceful ...”