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“... other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of major Saudi oilfields – had placed in doubt the Saudi role as a reliable ‘swing producer’, which could turn the taps on or off whenever it was in America’s strategic interest. The US government has, in its ‘special relationship’ with the House of ...”

“... has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be ...”

“... young Robin was educated at home, where he showed remarkable precocity. His father, who was John Ruskin’s secretary, undertook the task of educating his son himself; Robin received from him a very wide and thorough education – in ancient and modern languages, history, science, music, art. In his Autobiography Collingwood reports having had a certain ...”

“... writing, to a remarkable lyricism about Glasgow and its light. Indeed, Glasgow is the other major character in the novel. Andy identifies the city with his lost father: his father who (like John Betjeman) pointed out that it is one of the finest stone-built cities in the world. As Andy reflects on his personal ...”

“... to bourgeois European notions of the home, the parlour and of harmony in every sense required major ideological adjustments. The piano embodied a kind of Enlightenment clarity: its keyboard made manifest, literally in black and white, a tonal range independent of muscles, lungs or lips. Its individual notes, percussively produced, were ‘given’ and, in ...”

“... have a line there I wrote in Africa 15 years ago,’ a friend told him; others like John Davenport and Aiken merely kept score. And yet there is perhaps nothing in it as impressive as the first page and a half, a completely orderly progression of six paragraphs, massive and thrilling and utterly well-made, until the first line of dialogue takes ...”

“... as God’s service or the obligations of feudal allegiance. His later chapters on a series of major works present some problems. Mainline Puritan writings are perhaps the least satisfactorily treated throughout the volume, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, for example, being virtually ignored in spite of its signal transfer of emphasis from the Truth that life ...”

“... The proletariat inside Ulster, or rather the majority Protestant part of it, presented another major problem with which Connolly never came to terms. Here, Morgan reinforces the critical revisionist work of other Marxist scholars such as Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, particularly the latter’s Class Conflict and Sectarianism (1980). The basic defect in ...”

“... beginning. Before his death, partly in response to attacks and criticism, Erasmus completed four major revisions, beginning almost as the work came off the press. His revisions contained replies to his critics, knowledge newly gained from further manuscript study, and, as his irrepressible desire to communicate with his readers took charge, his reflections ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... the bizarre episode of the Crockford Preface, it was unfortunate for the Church that its two major preoccupations should have appeared to be both concerned with sex – with the appropriateness, or otherwise, of women as priests and with the acceptability, or otherwise, of homosexuals as candidates for ordination. If, even a few years ago, any TV commedy ...”

“... perhaps doesn’t make enough of the huge Allied superiority in planes and tanks, which played a major part in that year’s summer offensive – but he is surely right to argue that American intervention was crucial, not because of anything the Americans did (as Malcolm Brown and John Keegan show, the Canadians and ...”

“... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...”

“... no 17th-century vernacular poet of this name is now recorded.’ But this is of course John Ogilby, the dancing-master turned voluminous poet, whom Pope repeatedly gives us licence to call ‘great’ (‘Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great’ and ‘thy great fore-father, Ogilby’ in the Dunciad; Ogilby also ornaments MacFlecknoe). This ...”

“... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...”