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“... of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate. Marie Antoinette had just told the poor to go and eat cake: Malthus trumped her, apparently sentencing them to death by starvation – and all on the strength of the ‘facts’. No wonder Thomas ...”

“... the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ...”

“... tonal usages. As Jean-Michel Nectoux recounts, Fauré was lucky enough to receive an education at Louis Niedermeyer’s enlightened school that not only insisted on the lasting importance of the ancient modes but interpreted conventional tonal procedures with a wide latitude deriving from an awareness of modal alternatives to them: hence ‘modulation’ was ...”

“... old be eliminated. ‘I am dynamite,’ Nietzsche bellowed. Echoing this, the French incendiary Louis Aragon remarked that he could think of nothing more beautiful than a church and some dynamite. The immediate enemy was of course the beefy bourgeois, defender of property and social order, with his fixed ideas about beauty, truth and ...”

“... to poison the minds of the young. The academy was overrun by these ‘tenured radicals’ (as Roger Kimball put it in his 1990 book), engaged in the promulgation of an ‘illiberal education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in 1987). The sense of embattlement is palpable in a recent anthology ...”

“... future Archbishop of York), published an attack on Catholic exorcists in general and on the Jesuit William Weston in particular. It has been known since the 18th century that Shakespeare knew Harsnett’s work and borrowed from it the names of the devils by whom Edgar, in Lear, claims to be possessed. According to Greenblatt, however, the relation between the ...”

“... Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it sounded more ominous than that). William Bennett, Secretary for Education, also came to visit the campus. He is the author of To reclaim a heritage: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). Bennett thought that Western Culture had to stay and said so, face to face with Stanford’s ...”

“... well established by the early 18th century. Addison and Steele had their loveable curmudgeon Sir Roger de Coverley harrumph that he would be a better customer if Vauxhall offered more nightingales and fewer strumpets. A Virginian gentleman called William Byrd was matter of fact about the amenities in June 1718: We went to ...”

“... and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr James was a schoolboy under Sir Roger Fulford. He puts one in mind of those Sloane Rangers who, so it is said, keep to their A-level texts at university to avoid intellectual fatigue. Yet, as against this, his is the first biography of the Prince to make what might be called both significant ...”

“... by Sir Edward Coke to recall Charles I to his constitutional duty: according to Coke’s grandson Roger, he called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can find scant mention of this menacing language and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ...”

“... so are grace, nobility and even the kindness that comes close to being flattery. ‘Van Dyck,’ Roger de Piles noted, ‘took his time to draw a face when it had its best looks on.’ He painted Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, as a handsome woman – without, it would seem, losing the likeness. Yet her niece, who knew her first from the painting, was ...”

“... separate the different domestic smells of cooking, bodily waste and young children. As the lawyer Roger North wrote in 1698, ‘the affectation of cleanliness hath introduc’t much variety of rooms, which the ancients had no occasion for.’ The 18th century’s wholesale replacement of personal scents based on excremental animal odours with fragrant ...”

“... Here is a typical sentence: ‘The revived interest in the White House wiretaps also prompted William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try ...”

“... checking – she didn’t. For the earliest verified usage, we have to wait for the scholar-critic William Taylor in 1797, and even he had his doubts. He disliked ‘self-biography’, coined the previous year by Isaac D’Israeli, because ‘it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have ...”

“... a Post-Modern novelist, critic, political theorist, and privy adviser to the world’s great men. Roger Scruton has done the eminent Doctor for Frank Kermode’s ‘Modern Masters’. Alas, Criminale reflects no credit on that worthy series. He is revealed as the most treasonable of clerks, a compound of Waldheim, de Man, Harry Lime and ...”