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“... In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually ...”

“... own ‘armoured suburbs’. That private security firms make their biggest profits from furnishing iron gates, alarm systems, armoured cars and private bodyguards in those cities – Johannesburg, São Paulo, New Delhi – where the gap between rich and poor is greatest, provides powerful if not conclusive evidence for Klein’s claim. At the US border, new ...”

“... hoping to find a house where she could spend the winter (their difficult stay is recounted by Richard Murphy in his autobiography The Kick). Hughes’s letters appear cheerful and engaged and free of guilt. At this time, curiously, he concocts a plan to send poems out under one or two pseudonyms. He wants to invent a rival poet, ‘or perhaps two’, who ...”

“... extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most ...”

“... else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les ...”

“... they got.’ On 1 May 2003, I heard that 140 American soldiers had died in combat in Iraq. I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to ‘relax and celebrate victory’. I heard him say: ‘The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.’ I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: ‘We ought to look in a mirror and get ...”

“... of peace that came with the end of the Cold War – geopolitical with the disappearance of the Iron Curtain dividing the continent, and institutional with the extension of the European Union to the borders of the former Soviet Union. The originality of Ghervas’s reading of this transformation begins with its temporal and spatial ...”

“... but our present energy gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use of coke for iron smelting in 1709, James Watt’s invention of the external-condenser steam engine in 1765, and the sinking of the first oil well by Elmer Drake at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 – all of them, we might note, English-speaking businessmen. The three ...”

“... to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard Acland, figurehead of the Party, had been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties collectivism: the belief in the ...”

“... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...”

“... intimate fight with the young lover of the murdered blackmailer Geiger in The Big Sleep, ‘has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.’ Perhaps these days we’re too ready to find homoerotic subtexts in what seem to us exaggerated displays of masculinity in the literature of the era of oppression, but what are we to make of episodes like the one ...”

“... wrote of ‘blind Orion hungry for the morn’ in Endymion, while Turner’s near contemporary Richard Horne wrote an epic poem, Orion, the year before Turner exhibited Rain, Steam and Speed. Charles Lamb’s version of the Odyssey appeared in 1808: ‘Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty hunter, who was hunting there the ...”

“... in Italy, which shows a man penetrating an animal; similar images are common in the art of the Iron and Bronze Ages. Indigenous peoples in South-East Asia, Australasia and North America have traced their origins to sex between women and dogs. Ancient myths are full of human-animal hybrids: satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids; swan-Zeus, jackal-headed ...”

“... sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no ...”

“... steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable service; they can survive and flourish only by adaptation, for they belong to the future as well as ...”