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“... a centre of metropolitan science. If – in Joseph Priestley’s over-quoted phrase – the rotten English hierarchy had ‘equal reason to tremble even at an air pump’, these shudders might be stilled by a spark coil or a Faraday cage. Despite this, Faraday was not a Tory. Throughout his career he took great care to triangulate what seems to have been (at ...”

“... of women was exceptional.’ But unfortunately, ‘new forms of slavery appeared, the English arrived with their capital, their companies, their people. The real development of Paraguay was destroyed by the genocidal struggle of the War of the Triple Alliance, and again by the Chaco War of the 1930s.’ Paraguayan history has been marked by ...”

“... in 2105. It is anybody’s guess whether analytic philosophy will burst the boundaries of the English-speaking world and become dominant in universities around the globe, or whether the work of some synoptic visionary will persuade young philosophers in Britain and the US to turn their backs on the movement that Russell initiated. Someday – but not for ...”

“... lives of otherwise anonymous individuals, some of whom went on to kill themselves. Ben Stronge, an English chef ‘exposed’ in a story about swinging, begged the paper not to publish, because if they did he would never see his children again. They published, and he killed himself. Arnold Lewis, a Welsh teacher caught in a similar sting, told the NoW’s ...”

“... researched. It may not be an easy read – the fact that its author isn’t a native speaker of English shows at many points – but it is most certainly an indispensable ...”

“... Here the glory of the English; the flower of past kings; the form of future kings; a merciful king; the peace of his peoples; Edward III, completing the jubilee of his reign; an unconquered leopard; victorious in battle like a Maccabee . . . he ruled mighty in arms; now in heaven let him be a king. So (in translation) run the verses around the tomb of Edward III in Westminster Abbey, erected soon after his death in 1377 ...”

“... The posthumous English publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel, originally serialised in 1957-58 in the New York Yiddish newspaper the Forward; and about the reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime ...”

“... very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the Imperial War Museum hoping for ...”

“... context. Hamilton offers 22 case studies, from John Donne – the first properly biographed English author – to Philip Larkin of last month’s Observer fame. Hamilton could not, if he tried, write an unreadable book. Keepers of the Flame is that rarest of modern things, lit crit with laughs. Hamilton has an unfailingly good eye for anecdote and a ...”

“... Reynolds’s Discourses on Art and Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets. The Oxford History of English Literature hasn’t ‘superceded’ Johnson’s Lives, and there’s a sense in which we must say that the OED hasn’t superceded Johnson’s Dictionary either. Two streams contributed to its making, one gentleman and amateur, one professional. In the ...”

“... even now by memories from school. Till I read N.A.M. Rodger’s book I could not have placed Richard Grenville and the Revenge within twenty years, nor had any idea what he was doing ‘at Flores in the Azores’; nor do I know even yet (for Rodger is certainly not going to mention it) who wrote the poem about him, but I can remember whole stanzas of ...”

“... built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues ...”

“... tend to the latter sort. Adewale Maja-Pearce has strong grounds for taking this line: he is an English-born novelist, the son of a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother. In How many miles to Babylon? he tells us that he came home from his London school complaining that the other children called him a wog: his Scottish grandmother gave him the ...”

“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”

“... In​ 1944, as Richard Kay records, an optimistic litigant challenged the validity of a Victorian statute under which he was being sued, on the ground that Queen Victoria, like all her predecessors since 1689, had had no title to the throne. The argument, which would have wiped the statute book almost clean, was dismissed without much ceremony; but in 1688 and 1689 it occupied the centre of the political and constitutional stage ...”