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“... of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and Maitland’s famous essay on ‘Memoranda de Parliamento 1305’ calls ...”

“... almost exclusively at the power politics of theocracy, except for a few eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Theocratic failure and national defeat took place before the first signs of intellectual innovation. The most interesting 17th-century forerunner of the 18th-century efflorescence is Stair, whose Institutions captivate by their simple ...”

“... chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the ...”

“... of others’ work is low, especially by American standards, and with the single exception of Hugh Kenner no practising fellow academic earns the accolade of even approaching classic status. Ricks’s sympathy and magnanimity, two great ‘principles’ of his criticism (of which more anon), are reserved here for the dead. Ricks does indeed appreciate, as ...”

“... run over by Stephenson’s Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830. Thomas Love Peacock, who found a pleasant berth at the India Board after writing Nightmare Abbey, began to investigate the possibilities of navigating the Euphrates from the Gulf to northern Syria – the India mail already went that way, but by land. James ...”

“... of this world, readers of lyric poems live in a parallel universe along with Fotherington-Thomas and his flowers and birds. But Culler is no aesthete. In a final chapter he explores how the curious temporal status of lyric can give it a utopian force, as a form that evokes possible other worlds. Poems of praise can create imaginary communities, which ...”

“... trunked and bikinied masses. ‘Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1784). In the election of October 1974, Wilson got a bare majority, with 319 seats, but still lacked a clear mandate. Yet the country, it turned out, was less divided than it appeared. In 1975 there was a referendum on continuing membership ...”

“... and suddenly Smith was the epigone of ‘hysterical realism’, the misbegotten progeny of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie. When he repeated the charge in the Guardian after the 11 September attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive ...”

“... his time. But if that work made him a household name, it did nothing for his academic reputation: Hugh Trevor-Roper, not Taylor, was appointed regius professor in 1957. Quick to feel slighted, Taylor became ever more populist, and for a time limited his commitments at Oxford in order to direct the Beaverbrook Library. During the 1970s and the early 1980s he ...”

“... to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from ...”

“... of frivolity,’ he wrote, ‘they look like wandering jesters.’ The 12th-century theologian Hugh of St Victor echoed this idea in a popular work on the education of novices, arguing that the discipline that regulates the movement of the limbs also ‘quells all the disorderly impulses of the mind’. The aim of such teaching was to form an individual in ...”

“... thought that they were enlightening the womb, the last preserve of unreason, at least in Europe. Thomas Dawkes’s The Midwife Rightly Instructed (1736), written in dialogue, includes this exchange between a surgeon and a midwife, who has been instructed to remove the placenta manually:MIDW: Well, but Sir, if I do this, I must be obliged immediately to ...”

“... obligations of citizenship. Normally invisible, traces of it surface in the work of a critic like Hugh Kenner, pillar of the reactionary National Review, who gives equal praise to the joking despair of Beckett and the regimented utopianism of Buckminster Fuller. The alliance, in one form or another, is of long standing. Baudelaire understood its nature more ...”

“... moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ‘coda’ to his fine new book: ‘As writers like Thomas Hardy have noted, there is a certain timelessness about the common people, which means that in the last resort their experience can be expressed by myth as well as by history.’ Yes, and the response of present-day common people to the Royal Family has to ...”

“... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...”