Search Results

“... history. The ‘weasel Scot’ in Henry V is a nuisance not a nation, briefly distracting the king, like Henry VIII a century later, from his planned invasion of France. After the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, Shakespeare’s outlook changed, but Hutson sees King Lear as turning away ...”

“... response. Instead of putting Penn in the Tower, the British have sent a prince in a helicopter, David Willetts and a nuclear submarine to the South Atlantic to show the Argentinians who they’re messing with. Not unreasonably, their foreign minister has made an official complaint to the UN about the submarine – William and Willetts they can take in their ...”

“... effort much greater than would be required if you had plumped for a Pinter or an Ibsen or a David Hare. When we hear, for instance, that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came ...”

“... the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to swear to the preamble of the Act, since by doing so he would be denying Papal authority and implicitly rejecting the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. From 1527 he had been the ...”

“... After. That work made nonsense of the notion, fostered by Israel’s dynamic first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his acolytes, that ‘Israel’s leaders sought desperately to make peace with one or all of the Arab states but the Arabs, hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, turned down these overtures and repaid this goodwill with continued ...”

“... of earthly things – epidemic disease has been to Euro-American empires. These books – even David Herlihy’s posthumously published account of the Black Death in Europe – are best approached as essays in World History. As Samuel Cohn makes clear in his incisive introduction, Herlihy’s argument that the plague acted as a stimulus to Europe’s ...”

“... might be a recognition of that fact. If, however, his resignation is simply to make way for David Davis, then nothing has been learned. The Conservatives would do well to think harder next time: the old xenophobic parochialism which once did so well for them has weakened as the Conservative working class has disappeared. This culture’s disarray can be ...”

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

“... basic sociology of the SDP, I later realised, lay before me a decade before the event.Crewe and King might not wholly agree with this, for their view of the SDP élite which triggered the schism (and it was definitely a revolution from above) is far too friendly for them to enter into such cold sociological calculation. They are open about the fact that ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... Gregory, who can see connections that everyone else misses, such as between the patterns on Burger King buns and the price of sesame seed futures.) But having put his money into Facebook, Thiel did his best to take it out again. In 2006 he tried to persuade Zuckerberg to sell the business to Yahoo for $1 billion, confident that the offer greatly overvalued the ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period people were in the business of making images for themselves and investing ...”

“... febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II trembled at the sight of a naked sword: and the sight of an ass, if the chronicle of the time can be believed, sufficed to cause the Duke of Epernon to lose consciousness.’ Other stalwarts included Hobbes (fear of darkness), Pascal (fear of ...”