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“... Atlantic world. Travelling on to London that summer, Alexander was greeted by thronging crowds. William Wilberforce praised his anti-slavery stance in the House of Commons, calling him the ‘benefactor, not of Europe only, but of the human race’. Undeterred by Napoleon’s brief return to power in 1815, Alexander sought to confirm his status as ...”

“... Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a via media between the various ...”

“... In 1935, Edward James, English and very rich, entered into an agreement to purchase from Salvador Dali his most important works. It was a funny sort of agreement, but it lasted until 1939 and during that period James acquired a large number of Dali’s Surrealist works, including the telephone with a lobster replacing the receiver, two of the sofas which represent Mae West’s lips, and the painting Autumn Cannibalism, depicting two ‘Iberian beings’ eating one another with the help of spoon and fork and, according to the painter, expressing the pathos of civil war ...”

“... boycott of Euro 2012 is the way to go? So far the most prominent Briton to cry off is Prince William, but it’s not clear if this has anything to do with Tymoshenko. Many would see the possibility of politicians refusing to attend football matches as a boon. There’s been no serious suggestion of a boycott by players or fans. Despite the presence of ...”

“... student to find out what her invitation referred to, and accepted it only when she learned that William James had been there before her, with his Varieties of Religious Experience). The lectures were subsequently put together, after her death in 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth ...”

“... are 282 pages of verse in this edition, and 253 pages of commentary. Faced with a new theory, William James always wanted to ask: how would my life be better if I believed it? It should not now be irrelevant to ask how reading Housman is improved after reading the poems in this edition. Especially since, in the light of Housman’s own strictures ...”

“... Ancient initiation rites and schizophrenic delusions. Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is ...”

“... and apart from the preparations for enlargement, it was becalmed. British governments, first under James Callaghan and even more so under Mrs Thatcher, showed hostility to movement except in solution of the budgetary problem. For Britain, membership of the Community remained a reluctant necessity, and any further surrender of sovereignty was viewed with ...”

“... Puritans like Cartwright and Perkins (though Dr Kendall would not call him a Puritan), later King James I, all agreed on the essentials of theology. This orthodoxy was challenged by Laudians in the 1630s, by sectaries in the Forties and Fifties. By the end of the century, Calvinism was no longer the intellectual force it had been. It was not stressed by the ...”

“... William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, was born ‘in a somewhat furtive manner for a baby of his exalted rank’. In 1790 his father, the fifth Duke, and his mother, the giddy Duchess Georgiana, had been travelling in the Low Countries, where the Austrian threat became such that they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris ...”

“... John Clearwater, the tormented mathematician in William Boyd’s novel Brazzaville Beach, wants to reduce chaos, flux and turbulence to an elegant set of equations. He’s also an obsessive moviegoer who refuses to watch anything which doesn’t meet his one absolute criterion: ‘he believed, with a fundamental zeal, that a true film, a film that was true to the nature of its own form, had to have a happy ending ...”

“... depicting Hollywood’s own wild party. The paradigm of all movies about Hollywood is probably William Wellman’s 1937 melodrama A Star is Born, which has been remade twice as a musical and was itself based on George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? of 1932. The basic story contrasts the inexorable rise to stardom of an unassuming waitress with the fall ...”

“... criticism, but cannot really be mistaken for it, the aim being civilised chat (what his friend William Plomer admiringly described as ‘tea-tabling’) and a supply of recommendations for the guidance of listeners disciplined by Sir John Reith. Obviously there was nothing wrong in that; he was careful to read and chat about books of more than usual ...”

“... in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe’. In The City of Dreadful Night, James Thomson’s narrator prowls ‘lonely streets/Where one may count up every face he meets’. This is what the metropolitan insomniac does instead of counting sheep. For J. Alfred Prufrock, faces are masks – ‘there will be time/To prepare a face to meet ...”

“... A mob of divided, disgruntled Democrats packed the Chicago Coliseum in July 1896 as William Jennings Bryan rose to the platform and delivered a roaring speech – still the speech for part of the American left – about an economic chimera. Bryan demanded that the United States peg its currency not to gold but to silver – the equivalent of treating cancer with grape seeds ...”