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“... the TV pictures of the doomed publicity stunt undertaken by the former Minister of Agriculture, John Gummer, showing his attempt to force his daughter Cordelia to eat an over-hot burger and her wise, peremptory rejection of it. Reflect on the work of the American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who showed the relationship between cannibalism in Papua New ...”

“... painting much, if at all.’ In 1967 she decided the BBC job was ‘too time-consuming’ and took a job at New York’s first ever head shop instead.One night, on the way home to her apartment in St Mark’s Place (four rooms for $67 a month!), she dropped by the Balloon Farm, where she witnessed the Velvet Underground performing its Exploding Plastic ...”

“... settlement; why the King failed to dissolve or prorogue the Long Parliament; why Englishmen took sides in 1642; why negotiation failed in the same year; why the majesty of Charles I became so diminished that men were ready to fight him. Once these seven effects have been identified, it ‘becomes possible to match cause to effect’ with ...”

“... She began her address – ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’ – by saying: ‘According to John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, it is “repugnant to nature”, as well as “contumely to God, and the subversion of good order”, to promote a woman to any position of superiority in any realm. We in the ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to ...”

“... of our stage!’ His climactic description was elaborated in the Second Folio (1632) by the young John Milton: ‘Thou, in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a lasting monument.’ Historically, Shakespeare criticism begins with wonder, and that it should have returned there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of studies ...”

“... he doth smite you under the first rib.’ The pamphlet bears the influence of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, a recurring figure in Como’s radical coalition and the subject of Michael Braddick’s commanding and enlivening new biography. Lilburne fought courageously for Parliament as the nation’s defender against tyranny, but turned his eloquence and ...”

“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological assumptions behind the form of the novel ...”

“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... not for pigs, or chickens): why would they ban it if there really was nothing to fear? The public took the hint, and began to waver in its passion for beef, and especially beefburgers, which, of course, include bits of dead cow you’d just as soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then ...”

“... I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the degree of fidelity required of a translator of Homer (‘to copy him in all the variations of his style and the different modulations of his numbers ... not to neglect even the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the ...”

“... Thomas’s notion was that if you looked after the sound it didn’t matter whether the sense took care of itself; that it was possible to write great poems without worrying too much what they meant. The pleasure one gets from a Thomas poem has nothing to do with the pleasure of working it out or even the sense that one day one will be able to work it ...”

“... famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in India took place under British rule in Bengal in 1943, exacerbated by Churchill’s insistence that the grain must go to the troops and not to the people who grew it. Tharoor quotes Amartya Sen’s memorable dictum that there has never been a famine in a democracy with ...”

“... it: Everybody in South Carolina knew that blacks, for reasons unknown, fancied clay … The eating took place in a bedroom, for the galvanised bucket of clay was kept under the bed, for the cool. It was blue clay from a creek, the consistency of slightly gritty ice cream. It lay smooth and delicious-looking in its pail of clear water. You scooped it out and ...”