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“... their own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a ...”

“... private are piled promiscuously on any campus counter at the start of every term. Goffman is now Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, a far cry from that hotel in the Shetlands where, back in the days of rationing, he did his first fieldwork. Actually, anywhere would be a far cry from that hotel and not ...”

“... A family on the throne,’ observed Walter Bagehot, in one of those honeyed phrases which may mean more or less than they seem to, ‘is an interesting idea.’ Indeed, it is. But during the past two hundred years of British royal history, it is an idea which has embodied itself in two very different human forms ...”

“... modern world. Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather ...”

“... Yes, yes, Mr Burne-Jones,’ Benjamin Jowett is reputed to have said as he inspected the artist’s newly completed Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, ‘but what does one do with the Grail once one has found it?’ This sounds almost as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be ...”

“... idea of the lifetime’s project. In the last piece collected here, ‘Imaging’, Keiller quotes Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Surrealism’, dwelling in particular on his description of Breton and Nadja as ‘the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday ...”

“... tiresome adherence to the ‘correspondence theory of truth’, and directed them to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Excavation and Memory’, where Benjamin argues that genuine memory yields an image of the person who remembers rather than simply cataloguing events.It’s true that the protocols of Anglo ...”

“... and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently ...”

“... Life of Dickens’s Ellen Ternan, or the now-forgotten but interesting Portrait of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme de Charrière) by Wharton’s friend Geoffrey Scott – Mainwaring’s Mysteries is the product of long and deep digging in all kinds of likely and unlikely places. And in this dogged quest, she has been driven by motives quite ...”

“... passed ... in a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was ...”

“... shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended ...”

“... Play’ revolves around the death of former baseball star, George Chapman. Written by ‘Paul Benjamin’, and narrated in the first person by Max Klein, a private dick, it’s much the best bit of Hand to Mouth. The snappy dialogue and quick-fire clichés sit much more happily in this decent New York yarn than in the memoir itself. Our hero Klein is ...”

“... loan-jobbers, forestallers and other wartime profiteers accused of ripping off ordinary people. Walter Scott, part of a cavalry troop raised to ensure stability on the home front, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, found his conscience troubled when he was confronted in the line of duty with the looting of a bread shop: ‘Truth to say it was a ...”

“... the sensation of his own aesthetic responses: he wants to feel himself feeling again, to know what Walter Pater, in his Conclusion to The Renaissance, called the ‘strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ which exercises the aesthete. There is another, less precious, name for these individuals who swoon in and out of self-awareness with ...”

“... made to vindicate the theses of The Brown Book. It comes from an American lawyer and historian, Benjamin Carter Hett, who made his name with a well-researched and passionately written biography of the left-wing lawyer Hans Litten, whose humiliation of Hitler in a cross-examination during the trial of a group of stormtroopers towards the end of the Weimar ...”