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“... Sheerman demanding that Gordon stand down. Minutes later comes word that the pensions secretary, James Purnell, has resigned, leaving behind a message calling on Gordon to go. At least, unlike Hazel, he had the decency to wait until the election was over. How much more of this can we take? 5 June. Awoke to hear Paul Farrelly, the backbencher fingered by ...”

“... and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when King Alfred is supposed to have burnt the cakes – but on reflection one wonders whether it isn’t ...”

“... 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 in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... and in each of the synoptic gospels he commissions his disciples to do the same – the historian Peter Brown suggests it was the ‘most highly rated activity’ of the early Church. The ancient Mediterranean was populated by wandering holy men and charismatic healers, for whom exorcism was something between medicine and miracle. Church leaders who are ...”

“... a desire to save my soul.’ Four scholars were invited to reply to Coetzee – Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Barbara Smuts and Wendy Doniger – and all of them struggled in different ways to read his meanings. Singer seemed to suggest that Coetzee’s device was fundamentally evasive. ‘It’s a marvellous device, really. Costello can blithely criticise ...”

“... favour Philip II or Philip III. ‘For virtually every point, a counterpoint can be found,’ Peter Green lamented in 1981, and there the matter still stands today. The tone of the debate meanwhile has become more strident, as those with long-held positions find it increasingly important to defend them – especially the Greek archaeologists at ...”

“... They were animated not so much by Voltaire’s regard for the modernising zeal of the heirs of Peter I, but by the belief that it was Russia’s very ‘barbarism’, its proximity to the despotic rule and military virtue of the nomadic Scythians described by Herodotus, that made it the perfect agent for the regeneration of Europe. In a continent already ...”

“... and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and exploiter’, is reflected in Don Giovanni’s unsuccessful attempt ...”

“... boy, the source of the blood for the conspirators’ monstrous oath, but he allows the intrigue to peter out by page 62 for the sake of more cardboard callousness, as the boy’s owner chucklingly confesses: ‘I was sickened … That lad cost me thousands.’ Harris’s Cicero trilogy is a long way from being any kind of literary masterpiece, but I am pretty ...”

“... spoke to anybody, the shop was privately run so you couldn’t afford to shop here anyway.’ Peter Harris, another volunteer, was one of the first to move in, from his native Fakenham, in 2008. His career as a road engineer had been cut short when he slipped while carrying a 75kg kerbstone and badly injured his back. He hasn’t worked since. The ...”

“... Party, two MI5 officers in particular had fallen under the spell of the imaginative CIA agent James Angleton. Angleton became convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh ...”

“... Henry James met Rupert Brooke on a visit to Cambridge in June 1909, having been invited there by some young admirers who made him feel, he wrote in a letter, ‘rather like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting his Circassian Hareem’. Brooke, in a white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam ...”

“... Peter Hennessy has chosen for the dust jacket of Never Again a picture that exactly captures the mood of 1945. A returning British serviceman is being welcomed home by his wife and small son. ‘Home’ is a pre-fab, decked for the occasion with Union Jacks. The wife is wearing a neat, knee-length utility-model dress ...”

“... one moment very good and sensible, at another moment totally lacking in judgment’. James Callaghan ‘causes me a bit of concern ... he is a most talented Parliamentarian and a man of very considerable charm, but he seems to me to have absolutely no philosophical basis. You never know what he is going to say.’ Of Edith Summerskill: ‘the ...”

“... Mail as potentially ‘the Tory Jack Kennedy’. He was on the progressive wing of his Party. James Callaghan evidently thought that the best way to score against him in the Commons was to play this up: ‘The Right Hon. Gentleman is not fully a Socialist yet, but he is coming along.’ In his retrospective mood of repentance, Joseph played it ...”