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“... are however assailed, reasonably enough, in the persons of directors like Peter Brook and John Barton whose productions are determined by Kott’s or some other’s attempts to find in Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this class? Fish is a ...”

“... a period piece. In the nature of things, the essays had to be written some time back – that by John Redwood has a note explaining that the proofs had been approved before he joined the Government a year ago – and here it really matters. Another minister, John Patten, sticks his neck out in the foreword by claiming that ...”

“... the wild landscape of the estate he owned in south-west Scotland. The setting is commemorated by John Haddington’s fine photographs, and the initiative richly documented by John McEwen (Keswick’s nephew), in Glenkiln. The sculpture by Moore which is most eloquent in this context is the bronze seated King and Queen of ...”

“... One time in four, and usually to everyone’s surprise, John Cheever’s heroes spring a wry and furtive victory over disappointment. Cheever is irresistible in describing those delicious moments of triumph when a dogged loser suddenly strikes a home run – like Farragut’s escape from the penitentiary at the end of Falconer ...”

“... In Polish ears, the surname Norwid, and the Christian names Cyprian, Kamil, Ksawery, Gerard, ring alien, aristocratic, proud. Associated with the artist’s profession, they suggest a darling of fortune. Meanwhile the photograph of Cyprian Norwid which appears in school textbooks, the only one there is, dating from 1856, presents a man dismal in expression, with shaggy black hair, gaunt and even hungry-looking, tightly wrapped in a coarse overcoat ...”

“... These are the skills that Lilly had in an exceptional degree. Geneva has read his textbook, Christian Astrology (1647), as an introduction to esoteric astrological learning; but it is also an initiation into the skills of the witch-doctor, and, consequently, an elaborate exercise in self-promotion. Its full title, ...”

“... raise the alarm because he knew the criminal. The reader of these opening anecdotes in Silence: A Christian History senses that MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and one of the most lucid and authoritative TV historians ever, would prefer to stand by like the original dog, a quiet and eloquent witness to the hubbub and hurly-burly ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... correctness gone mad’. (Criticism didn’t come only from the Right: see, for example, John Upton’s piece in the LRB, 1 July 1999.) The accusations Johnson had in mind might include an article about Macpherson by a certain Boris Johnson that appeared in the Guardian last February – in which the author wondered how ‘this sober old ...”

“... on Swift’s memorial tablet, a tablet that notably does not contain any mention of the usual Christian consolations – any hope of salvation or another life beyond this one. It is strange because Swift had distanced the satirical writings from his own feelings: they were written in the voices of personae whose attitudes and beliefs had been chosen ...”

“... rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists abroad; she was less ready to give them armies or subsidies. Charles I, profoundly ...”

“... Thames and Hudson volume Photomontage, which exposed a new generation to the interwar art of John Heartfield, George Grosz and Hannah Höch. The earliest of Linder’s collages have a graphic simplicity borrowed from fashion illustration, sometimes with a twisted take on ageing glam rock: one of the mocked-up female faces looks like Brian Connolly, the ...”

“... the Sunday Times and the Cricketer magazine published his pictures; many of them are reprinted in Christian Ryan’s new book on Eagar’s work during that year’s English cricket season, Feeling is the Thing that Happens in a 1000th of a Second (Riverrun, £20). These photographs made Eagar’s reputation. I was a boy at the time, and had a subscription to ...”

“... of the Jewish village of Mifshata. Fassuta – a real place – is now part of Israel, and its Christian inhabitants belong to the 700,000-strong Arab minority inside the 1949 ‘green line’ of the Israeli state. Everyone in Fassuta has a story to tell, and the historical fact of dispossession means that this story is one of the few things they really ...”

“... chance of resuscitating an Aristotelian conception of practical reason than of restoring the Christian religion to cultural dominance. But in the judgment of some of the most acute participants in MacIntyre’s story – David Hume, for example, and more profoundly Machiavelli and Locke – it was the abandonment of Christianity which had by far the more ...”