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“... genuinely independent Cabinet deriving its authority from an elected parliament. The only possible hope of getting the Emperor to do so was to mobilise pressure in influential Western circles to persuade the paranoid old ruler to prepare for the post-imperial age which was close at hand. The idea was that I should approach the Emperor with a set of ...”

“... They might travel in companies, like Chaucer’s fun-loving band on the road to Canterbury – or hope to escape with their lives from the bandits who haunted mountainous pilgrim routes. They might themselves be armed, for no distinction was made at the time between pilgrims and crusaders. Most shrines kept records of their miracles, and so left behind ...”

“... as a teacher in an FE college and became a bookseller myself. A subsidiary motive for this was the hope that it would make me less acquisitive if I was buying books in order to sell them, not keep them. I spent most of my thirties in that world, accumulating a large and somewhat specialised stock in my basement (modernism, left-wingery, the Spanish Civil ...”

“... as far as we know he didn’t regularly attend a church. It is fair enough to describe him, as Christopher Hill did, as a radical Protestant heretic; but while Milton’s heterodoxy has become more widely acknowledged among scholars in recent years, there is still a good deal of confusion as to what it does and does not mean. ‘Orthodox’ and ...”

“... angels enter the story rather late, but grow quickly in attentiveness and popularity. Christopher Smart trusted that ‘my Angel is always ready at a pinch to help me out and to keep me up.’ They could give domestic help: Gemma Galgani, who died in 1903, was brought coffee by her guardian angel when she was ill, which she frequently was. Pope ...”

“... zenith. It ended on a downbeat note: ‘Most of the world is passing through bad times, but … hope itself cannot be abandoned.’ Yet much of the preceding narrative was about Ali’s involvement in radical struggles that either succeeded or, for a time at least, felt promising and thrilling. He described flying into a bombed and blacked-out Hanoi to ...”

“... throughout his career. Start with ‘content’. I believe the next train is for Manchester, and I hope there will be a seat available. Philosophers like to say that these states – belief and hope – exhibit ‘intentionality’, which is a fancy way of saying that they are about certain things. But ...”

“... I’m more often than not completely baffled by his music . . . I persevere – but have little hope of catching up with any of them. All rather depressing.’ There was little love lost the other way round, as I can vouch from personal knowledge. ‘Arse over tippett’ was not, I think, forgiven, nor Walton’s campaign, provoked by the success of Britten ...”

“... that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments. Christopher Duffy even provides a map of the likely troop movements to the north of London, making graphically real the imaginary confrontation with which I began. He counts out all the groups of soldiers that would have been involved and tries to estimate the ...”

“... of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this brilliant, passionately concentrated ‘adversarial reading’ of Eliot’s work. I say ‘another repudiation’ advisedly, because Julius’s book was rejected by Oxford University Press on the ...”

“... he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 January. Wake this morning thinking of a line that I’ve always remembered Burt Lancaster delivering in a costume drama. Caught out after curfew, he says: ‘I am apothecary Manzoni on an errand of mercy ...”

“... further than most in making sense of the society emerging from the ruins. This was no easy task. Christopher Clark’s recent history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, shows that most Europeans experienced the preceding decades as a time of ‘flux and transition’. In France, a number of different political futures seemed possible. Some of these were ...”

“... in England he fell ill and went to take the waters at Bath. There he met his future father-in-law Christopher Nugent, an Irish Catholic with a French medical degree. The waters helped a little but Burke did not fully recover his health until the latter part of 1753, by which time he had completed his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the ...”

“... over from blank incomprehension to bored déjà vu. But of course, at its best – as in ‘Faith, Hope and Love’, the last chapter of the first book of The Tin Drum – the narrative emerges from those twin dangers with supreme success. The heading from the First Epistle to the Corinthians provides the chapter with its leitmotif. It begins in fairytale ...”

“... of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist on spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection, but doesn’t quite fall in. Suppose, I bought a ticket at the museum; biked in daily, and read history. Suppose I selected one ...”