“... forging of his career. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the outcome is not a volume buckling under the weight of its own minutiae, but one soaring in iconoclastic originality. Some measure of the ambitiousness of Outram’s undertaking can be gained by juxtaposing it with John Lesch’s account of the emergence of French experimental physiology – a first-rate ...”

“... not want the sort of revolutionary changes they advocated, and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a ...”

“... totally eclipsed by Cagney and co as gangster films hit their stride. Of a child-star called Baby Richard Headrick: dunked in a fountain thirty times in an afternoon, shivering and fighting back tears, and with his father standing guard. Schulberg’s detached yet sympathetic gaze seems to have been sharply focused almost since birth, and behind many episodes ...”

“... Ariès’s contribution to historical knowledge, however.) The other contemporary historian is Richard Cobb. For once, I am one up on him, for he rates only a single entry. Admittedly, it is a marvellous passage, his reflections on the suicides recorded in Box D4U17 in the Archives de la Seine, the dossiers of the morgue in the old Châtelet of Paris from ...”

“... the upper auxiliary note of a trill, and the other things which worry our scholar-performers. The weight to be given to an up beat, how staccato is staccato, whether it is possible, or even sensible, to attempt a continuous legato, these are the issues – just as they would be in Beethoven or Chopin or, for that matter, Stravinsky. Kirkpatrick will annoy ...”

“... though fresh and accurate, hews close enough to the standard judgments. Elsewhere he gives more weight to preference and prejudice. Aaron’s Rod fails to interest him (‘a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’), though Kangaroo, also a loose, hasty improvisation and also a political fantasy, is one of his favourites (‘the formlessness ...”

“... other ex-communists, also contributed to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman. He went on to foster a series of CIA-funded seminars, populated by Encounter contributors, in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach.Koestler’s adventurous past in the Spanish Civil War, along with his explorations of cosmology (The ...”

“... by HarperCollins. Eve’s irritating editor, Amanda Farley-Brown, is crossing her fingers that Richard and Judy will feature a Genuine. But Eve is blocked, unable to begin work on the next book, and has decamped to a holiday house in Norfolk for a change of scene and to get away from dead people’s relations, taking her husband and two children with ...”

“... who may have adopted interpretations different from our own. We must therefore not only give weight to our fellow citizens’ views in the decision-making process, but also construct a political and social system that delivers the conditions without which they could not exercise their capacity to establish and revise those views. In more concrete ...”

“... the same that she does not allow the social and political implications of these plays their full weight, and that an undeclared but apparent bias against tragicomedy as a genre leads her to regard their endings as simpler and more glibly reassuring than they are. Several of the polarities she tries to set up seem suspect in the light of the best recent work ...”

“... The evidence underpinning prosecutions was often wobbly, and judgment susceptible to the weight of social prejudices and assumptions. Racism was a driving force in the case of Shapurji Edalji, an Indian-born clergyman, and his son George. In 1888, contemptuous and threatening letters began to arrive at the Edalji family’s vicarage, and the ...”

“... monarchy and as tsar receives the narrator in the Kremlin, wearing the Cap of Monomakh, the weight of which was once deplored by Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Like Rybakov, Voinovich has been overtaken by events: whatever may be the end-result of the Gorbachovshchina, for the moment the progress towards a grey, featureless socialist future seems to have ...”

“... into it.’ This conviction allowed him to present the farm labourer as bearing the huge symbolic weight that this culture has bestowed on him, since Richard Jefferies allowed Hodge to lumber into view, in the 1880s, a huge, romantic figure, of elemental simplicity of mind. Indeed, Evans’s earliest work can be clearly ...”

“... the 13 volumes as a great Victorian flagship, carrying with it, ‘as flagships do, the full weight of a nation consumed with the struggles of democracy at home, imperialism abroad, and a culture seeking to mediate the eclipsing of religion by the gospel of science’. The imperial foundations of the OED, as Willinsky uncovers them, are part racist (Max ...”

“... need not be undermined by historical self-awareness. And he shrewdly adds: That does not mean, as Richard Rorty likes to suggest, that we must slide into a position of irony, holding to liberalism as practical liberals, but backing away from it as reflective critics. That posture is itself still under the shadow of universalism: it suggests that you cannot ...”