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“... of Sir Edmund Backhouse, and concerned with a character no less shadowy and bizarre, the atomist Nicholas Hill. A rogue Catholic and a disciple of Giordano Bruno, Hill seems to have promoted a little-known rebellion on the death of Queen Elizabeth, a doomed and farcical adventure apparently intended to establish, on the unpromising soil of Lundy Island, a ...”

“... patching it together as he goes along and unable to make up his mind. (Nabokov’s version, the best-known older translation, is a bit more demure than Randall’s, less savage.) So Pechorin, in this account, is both strongly male and slightly effeminate, bold and weak, fair and dark, finely dressed yet dusty from travel. On the one hand, the narrator is a ...”

“... his role in life says he should be: ‘a model of the industrious, capable person, doing his best for humanity in his own field without meddling in matters beyond his scope’. Hagauer’s fixity is deadly, Agathe’s mercurial spirit quite beyond his terms of reference. When she leaves him, he falls back on a legalistic invocation of family values. In ...”

“... to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this anthology hands over to Nicholas Spice, who in turn sensibly makes sure that Karl Miller’s long essay about the LRB heads the list of contents. This essay is to be relished, not least when it is most uncertain. If the style is less tortuous than usual, the stylist is even more ...”

“... through his speech. He even spoke of the February Revolution of 1917, which saw the overthrow of Nicholas II and the installation of the Provisional Government, in terms which only briefly discussed the role played by the Bolsheviks. A fondness for the NEP is not new among professional historians in the Soviet Union. One, P.V. Volobuev, re-emerged from the ...”

“... second edition must further endorse Wollheim’s reputation as a major contributor to aesthetics. Nicholas Wolterstorff, in Works and Worlds of Art, begins where Wollheim leaves off. His central topic is that of representation in the arts and he draws his theoretical framework from the philosophy of action and from ‘speech act’ theories of ...”

“... a cadre of long-serving civilian clerks, administrators and experts (of whom Samuel Pepys is the best known) who accumulated and passed on knowledge, and over time transformed what the navy could achieve. They implemented technological changes such as the copper-sheathing of ships’ hulls, so that British warships became faster than their competitors. They ...”

“... Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools is something of a capstone on a long scholarly career devoted to the history of education, running from his English Schools in the Middle Ages (1973) to Medieval Children (2001), and taking in thirty other studies listed in the bibliography, most of them the product of detailed archival research ...”

“... There is, indeed, a lot of Dewey, notably his ‘metaphysics of experience’, which I think it best to discard. Tiles and I agree that Dewey wanted the ‘whole philosophic tradition going back to Descartes’ to be discarded, and that he ‘wanted a new and more fruitful philosophy to grow in place of what he regarded as moribund’. But Tiles (like Ralph ...”

“... to work for Colnaghi’s, a commercial gallery in Mayfair. Hollis, also out of a job, created his best-known and most widely disseminated work: the cover for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), the book that accompanied the documentary series. (Berger had taught Hollis drawing as a student, and Hollis also designed a striking jacket for his novel G.) The ...”

“... and a painter then, but more properly a ‘limner’, a painter of works in watercolour. The best-known limner was Nicholas Hilliard, who held a monopoly given by Queen Elizabeth ‘to make portraits . . . of our body and person in small compass in limning only’. Kim Sloan explains in the catalogue (British ...”

“... after his early political disappointments, who views concern with this-worldly affairs as (at best) a conscientious return from the heights to ‘the cave’? Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are surely the two most distinguished political philosophers of our day, and their work exhibits many parallels: but on this deeply political matter they are worlds ...”

“... Branagh. Ambition, that is, not thwarted ambition. In fact Ambition would surely have been the best title for this memoir if Julie Burchill hadn’t gone and beaten him to it. For the characters in Burchill’s little novel, after all, ambition is really nothing more than the sum of their routine material aspirations: but for Branagh, as he portrays ...”

“... artist; which was not how he judged himself. Reportedly he regarded the poems for which he is now best known as mere ‘recreations of his youth’. When he sent them in manuscript to friends or patrons he didn’t always trouble to keep copies. Gradually his mind was taken over by religion. By his mid-thirties he was writing religious verse which has never ...”

“... dignity were a sham: the managers always had the last word, and treated their charges at best as amusing rustics, at worst as ignorant degenerates out of Tobacco Road. Nor did the Collins model produce unfailing harmony between migrants and managers. Ray Mork quarrelled with the campers at Indio in 1939, threatening to throw them out if they did not ...”