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“... the throne. Though no republican himself, Hotman sketched the outlines of a republican myth that Hugo Grotius and others would develop at length. Tacitus helped them show that the constitution of the Dutch Republic – whose citizens presumably descended from the Batavi – grew from deep historical roots. Two hundred years later, Herbert Baxter Adams, the ...”

“... and ancient peasant struggles against the landlords. The process that began with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela nearly ten years ago, and continued with the emergence of leftist presidents at the head of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, may yet produce a surprise result in Paraguay’s elections. Fernando Lugo, a 58-year-old former ...”

“... that’s the enemy.’ She married Gianmartino Arconati Visconti in 1873 – Victor Hugo was one of the witnesses at the wedding. She was 33 at the time, her husband was 34. He died three years later, leaving her an immense fortune. She spent much of it on education, founding chairs at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, buying the contents ...”

“... is one         Free in soul beneath the sun.Mazzini might die ‘chainless’, but the young poet’s sense of honour felt shackled. ‘Too long the world has waited,’ the second stanza begins, ‘Against his chain the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford ...”

“... of which were an old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady’ – and calls it ‘proto-Hemingway’; he also claims for her prose ‘the lean authority of the Bible’. In the all too rare moments when Wilson is lost for inspiration, he resorts to dropping in big words: scesis ...”

“... almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ...”

“... in July 1974, which were recorded and released as David Live, and in August recorded the bulk of Young Americans there with a new line-up of musicians, including Carlos Alomar on guitar. When the tour resumed in the autumn, with many of the musicians from Philadelphia now on stage, Bowie ditched the elaborate set and changed his costume, performing in his ...”

“... will drive the healthy to sex: soon after Stravinsky died Craft got married – to Stravinsky’s young nurse, an event that is just about noted (in a 1994 postscript). But the book leaves one in no doubt that Craft’s feelings for both Igor and Vera Stravinsky were of painfully acute filial love. ‘They are the most marvellous people in the world ... a ...”

“... of morbid anaesthesia. The self-absorption, the proneness to erotomanic bizarrerie, the display of young doggishness demanding to be loved, the simultaneous apathy towards the feelings of others, are reminiscent of Dylan Thomas, that other priapic show-off descending on London from an Anglo-Celtic metropolis, except that the earlier incarnation seems to have ...”

“... of motherhood and ‘my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce’: ‘I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left.’ She pointed out the guest’s childlike characteristics:[It is] smaller than anyone in the family … has a peculiar appearance … and does not understand ...”

“... of Johnnie Walker Black Label, smashing his head in and then cutting his throat. Accompanied by a young nephew, he decamps for Bangalore. Of course, Balram knows that his employer’s family will visit vengeance on his. But he doesn’t care. His brothers and their children may be slaughtered, the women of the family may be raped, but he is indifferent. Adiga ...”

“... neighbours are sometimes apprehensive, they are not participants in its troubles. Even President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (about whom Richard Gott has recently written in the LRB) has done no more than strike an occasional ‘Bolivarian’ populist attitude. Few countries in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international ...”

“... fools! They think they have elected a Tory, but of course they have elected a Whig.’ Today’s young historians, while for the most part politically Whig (or SDP, or at least bien-pensant), nonetheless regard the inherited version of English history as a conspiracy wrought by a long line of Whig (and Protestant) writers. Products of a period of national ...”

“... rural Americans by the Soviet humorists Ilf and Petrov, taken on their ‘American road trip’; young Muscovites gazing lovingly at a giant model of a sprawling skyscraper. Seen as a montage, this array of images has the quality of an Adam Curtis film, a procession of strange, jarring anecdotes set in an exciting and terrifying ultramodern world which now ...”

“... tossed him some meaty bones, which he gnawed loudly, often controversially. In 1989 he disparaged Hugo Young’s biography of Thatcher, in a piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a ...”