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“... to lift the weapons of murder against our French and other brethren,’ she is reported to have said, ‘then we shall shout: “We will not do it.” ’ In this context, Luxemburg’s celebrated theory of the ‘Mass Strike’ must be understood as a strategy for paralysing the state at the moment of declaration of war. The SPD leadership lacked both her ...”

“... had all been condemned as Class A war criminals by the allies, reached the Yasukuni. Nothing was said or done about them until 1978, when a very right-wing new head priest, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, ‘enshrined’ the Class A war criminals in a secret ceremony, in effect including them among the deities to be worshipped. Word soon leaked out and Hirohito, along ...”

“... were the ‘Tudor’ characteristics – those possessed in common by Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I? Ruthlessness? At first, that seems a promising answer. After all, even Edward VI before his premature death managed to exhibit his father’s notorious ‘frown’. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... not painful enough, the malign intelligence behind the plot had been the kaiser’s uncle, King Edward VII, who had died in 1910: This, in a nutshell, is the true, naked situation engineered so slowly and surely by Edward VII, elaborated and systematically expanded through covert talks with Paris and St Petersburg, and ...”

“... People​ said things about Karl, but not often to his face. He might like the things or he might not, and that did not always depend on whether they were intended as compliments or the opposite. Personal remarks could be returned with interest, hot or cold. Whichever way, he remembered them with accuracy.I can think of two personal remarks about Karl, in his early years, which reached him and went down well ...”

“... a nature a little lower than that of angels and assumed by far higher than they,’ according to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of ...”

“... as his dissertation). This was during the heyday of critical theory at Columbia. On one side was Edward Said, who taught Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and poststructuralism (this was the moment of Orientalism) and on the other side was Sylvère Lotringer, founder of the journal Semiotext(e), who advocated Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Jean-François ...”

“... Rich and eccentric, Edward Perry Warren was used to indulging his whims. After seeing Rodin’s The Kiss in 1900, he was determined to have a replica carved by the sculptor himself. It was to be exact in every respect except one. He asked Rodin to provide a full view of the nude man’s genitals. Four years later the piece was completed and delivered to its new owner ...”

“... Oxford Book of American Verse, Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John, Andrew Motion’s The Poetry of Edward Thomas (‘Am I to suppose this is how he talks to his students, poor sods?’). The fame of other writers Grigson takes as an affront: ‘a sudden fashion for Borges, a fashion for Beckett, a fashion for Bunting’. Imagine publishing in 1976 and ...”

“... who, in the novel, are only reported – Jimmy, the early lover of Dowell’s wife; the girl Edward Ashburnham kissed in a railway carriage – and makes people speak what Ford’s characters certainly would not have uttered – as when Florence says to Leonora of Dowell: ‘he wouldn’t take me when he could have done.’ He leaves out what Ford saw ...”

“... English products: ‘Truly, England is our garden of delights,’ Innocent is reported to have said, ‘an inexhaustible well from whose plenty many things may be extorted.’ (Paris went on to note that ‘the London merchants who dealt in these things were not displeased, and sold them at whatever price they chose.’) A detail from the Clare ...”

“... from the superb Carolingian manuscript then in England and now in Utrecht, it should not have been said, without a word of warning, that they ‘presumably reflect Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical usage’. One can see what Professor Fell means when she dismisses the – potentially appalling – implications of the Anglo-Saxon penitentials, because it is true that ...”

“... so. Perhaps the greatest of them, Reynold Bray, an abrasive, straight-talking midlander who it was said could ‘do anything’ with the king, went by plain ‘Mr Bray’. The greatest nobles in the land pledged him their loyalty and service – a collection of their correspondence to him, scrapingly obsequious, is held in Westminster Abbey – knowing that a ...”

“... are, like him, lawyers. ‘I took my son to make his first appearance in the Supreme Court,’ he said. ‘He looked at the portraits of the old judges and there he saw his grandfather.’ Youssef Hakim, Jacques’s father, had been an Ottoman-trained jurist who served on the Court during the country’s brief moment of independence under King Faisal in ...”

“... rather than be thought ‘difficult’.A propos of which is Whitman’s description of himself to Edward Carpenter: ‘An old hen … with something in my nature furtive’.2 February. Late for a final rehearsal for the tour of Talking Heads I rush out of the house on this bright spring-like morning to be confronted by a large pile of excrement on the ...”