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“... exuberantly invented or appropriated names – Ikea, Asraboth, Otis Lemming – ambush you into reading the documentary account of a murder as if it were simply another overplayed punch line. The switch can be interpreted in several ways. You could assume that you are coming under satirical attack – that Depraved Indifference is a sly exposure of the ...”

“... it required a great deal more moral courage than I had at the time.’ What was needed, on this reading, was a more courageous Redeemer than Joseph, not one who was cleverer. Here are the implicit terms on which Joseph deferred to Thatcher’s superior claims as leader, while she deferred to his as prophet. Two further points help to establish Joseph’s ...”

“... the exilic corpus as entitled to the same degree of scholarly attention as Ovid’s earlier work. Peter Green was in at the beginning of the boom when he published his spirited and sympathetic translation in 1994, now reissued with a new foreword and updated bibliography; any quotations from Ovid in this piece are taken from his excellent versions. Green ...”

“... yet we can see that the two halves would actually fit together. The gap should not be there. What Peter James – the main author and incidentally the designer of the jacket – and his four collaborators seek to prove is, put simply, that the entire early history of the civilised world has been similarly distorted. An intrusive, imaginary gap, partly of ...”

“... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...”

“... harder than their English counterparts to win lasting admiration. The efforts of Louis XIV, which Peter Burke chronicles in his new book, were truly staggering, even by the standards of Early Modern monarchy. Images of the King were commissioned, Burke recounts, in paint, bronze, stone, tapestry, pastel, enamel, wood, terracotta and wax. The royal treasury ...”

“... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...”

“... and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and exploiter’, is reflected in ...”

“... him through, laced with a partly affected Aussie contempt for British toffs, doesn’t make good reading. Nor, of course, does official prose as a rule. Official prose tends to be thought of as clumsy and slightly weak on grammar, the sort of thing that goes: ‘Applications are required to be submitted not later than the 1st April with the exception of ...”

“... Slavic name), provided rich pickings for grave-robbers until looting them was made illegal by Peter the Great in the early 18th century. It was Peter the Great who commissioned the first archaeological excavations of Scythian tombs and his Siberian Collection, on which much of our knowledge of Scythian material culture ...”

“... cabaret at the ICA during Poetry International, 1973. ‘Bob Lull’ was first encountered there reading his newly composed ‘Notes for a Sonnet’. Later in the evening, he appeared, unable to leave well or ill alone, with the poem rewritten – ‘Revised Notes for a Sonnet’ – and then in a third appearance provided an anguished coda entitled ‘Notes ...”

“... includes a scene in which he is tricked into having sex with some sooty pots and pans. Acting or reading out plays helped pupils connect to a second language. It taught them to deliver Latin speeches clearly and meaningfully. Learning a language was also training in the effective use of voice.It is easy to overlook how loud premodern education was. Most of ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... Others are crumbly or empty or both. The editing is lazy. Some articles are followed by potted reading-lists, others not. There is no description of the contributors. Edward Timms writes usefully about Benda and Gottfried Benn. He notes accurately that the Dreyfus Affair lies at the very roots of the relations between intellect and power, between the ...”

“... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...”