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“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... the bulk of the lesser clergy) were Tory and consequendy not overly sympathetic to their masters in London. Cambridge, by contrast, was largely pro-government in this period, but – in the case of many of its fellows – out-of-step with the Court during the first half of George III’s reign. It required the French Revolution, which seemed to ...”

“... and so forth would fit his description very well. Although Meissonier’s first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He ...”

“... Miller found quite unacceptable. And with a final glance back to the earliest of the sage’s masters, Chesterton, Miller declared that McLuhan ‘has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the possibility of truth by shocking us all with a gigantic system of lies’. Miller’s book has the virtue of making his objections clear, but ...”

“... of Spion Kop. The most dangerous wars are successful ones. Victorious generals and their political masters prefer to delude themselves by taking the credit for winning, and so construct fictional accounts of the war, imputing rational calculation where none could have existed. Such is the hair’s breadth between disaster and triumph that spite, recrimination ...”

“... First: ‘The narrative of Robinson Crusoe is the account of how a single man gradually masters his own compulsions and extends his control over a huge, indifferent, even potentially hostile environment, learning to harness its inhuman forces and to put them to use for his own benefit. In this process, which is essentially that of rationalising the ...”

“... And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney. By 1931 he was already proclaiming, in a letter to William Soutar, that he was not the man to write ‘bairn rhymes or re-popularise Scots’, though he still thought ‘re-vaccination of the children with it’ an excellent idea. Some difficult years – in personal matters – and a change of orientation in ...”

“... being called upon to fill. The fragmentation of English culture will be healed, our educational masters believe, if all pupils can be taught and examined on the same literary texts, the same events from British history and the same rules of grammar. The fact that such a reactionary pedagogy is likely to undermine the popularity of English as a school and ...”

“... complete. As a Scottish pro-Hanoverian put it, ‘a handfull of the Scum of the Highlands are Masters of Scotland without burning almost a pound weight of powder.’O’Keeffe does not give much space to the march on London which followed, or to the Jacobites’ decision to turn back at Derby, not having found the recruits or support they had expected. He ...”

“... and foreigners, and complete equality between the sexes; slaves have the same freedom as their masters, and even domestic animals acquire the same sort of rights as their owners. If this sounds familiar, we can perhaps begin to understand what it is about late modernity that strikes some people as apocalyptic. Eliot, as he acknowledged in a radio interview ...”

“... master is a satire on this faith (as well as on the master’s unexamined belief that we are all masters of our actions). Diderot seems to have been provoked into writing Jacques le fataliste by his reading of Tristram Shandy. The opening of Jacques le fataliste is an imitation of a passage from Sterne’s novel, where Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby’s ...”

“... distort, human purposes is well known. In this sense, American presidents are servants as well as masters of what have been considered their most powerful weapons. But presidents can be hobbled for more mundane and easily documented reasons. The White House has inevitably been subject to manipulation by the powerful and sprawling bureaucracy created during ...”

“... argued the apologist George Fitzhugh, would be better off if we enslaved them all, for then their masters would have some incentive to clothe them, feed them and see them through hard times. Abraham Lincoln came up with a famous rejoinder when he insisted that working for wages was only a temporary condition. Among us, he said, nobody with talent languishes ...”

“... some of the cultural differences between the two labs. (This story is meticulously told in William Broad’s Teller’s War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception, 1992.) When the X-ray laser was ditched, Teller scarcely missed a beat, drumming up enthusiasm for the space-based anti-missile system known as ‘Brilliant Pebbles’ – the ...”

“... where, as Roberta Joan Anderson, she grew up the only child of Myrtle, a former teacher, and William, a military man turned grocery store executive. ‘People that shouldn’t have been married, really,’ Mitchell said, and from whom ‘I never had any support.’ ‘I respect faith, but doubt gets you an education,’ the playwright and conman Wilson ...”