Search Results

“... of Islam contain a positive assessment of the 12th-century Kurdish prince Saladin, who fought Richard the Lionheart; and Reiske, who called for the incorporation of Islamic history into university curricula. ‘We wonder at the rapid progress of the victories of Alexander the Great, greater than anyone might conceive,’ he wrote in 1747. ‘Yet why do we ...”

“... was no longer permitted.During the 2014 election campaign, Orbán had dismissed the separation of powers as ‘an American invention, which Europe, perhaps due to intellectual mediocrity, borrowed and applied to European politics’. Ahead of the election that year, the government spent millions of forints on TV advertising that repeated Fidesz slogans. With ...”

“... much ambiguity – she wanted to kill him, and not quickly.’ Miranda Seymour (no relation) and Richard Perceval Graves (the poet’s nephew) present Amy Graves in less hysterical terms, but agree that her rigid notions of purity helped inculcate Graves’s sexual difficulties. When on holiday with his family in Brussels in 1912, a young Irish girl staying ...”

“... characters the names of her intimate friends. Julia Briggs shows that two of Nesbit’s lovers – Richard Reynolds and Oswald Barron – are saluted in the figures of Dicky and Oswald Bastable. She also suggests that in these books Nesbit represented herself as twins: a weedy boy poet and his spirited sister. The weed’s name is Noel: Mrs Briggs has ...”

“... that global conflict is the assault of the old on the young, the system on the individual, the powers that be on the little people. Trumbo relies on sledgehammer irony: ‘I used to be a consumer,’ Joe explains at one point, ‘I’ve consumed more shrapnel and gunpowder than any living man.’ He prefers grandiose gestures and Biblical incantations to ...”

“... be dangerous to liberty. Hence they hedged it round as best they could with counter-balancing powers and bits and pieces of 18th-century political machinery to keep rampant ambition under control. Yet it was, and remains, a one-man executive. As Truman said, ‘the buck stops here.’ In this respect, Kissinger stood to Nixon as Bismarck had stood to ...”

“... has its quota of resident yogins, astrologers and cabalists. Guidebooks to these regions abound. Richard Cavendish in The Magical Arts makes an ambitious survey of the whole field – numerology, the Cabala, alchemy, astrology – and then, crossing the boundary between the dubiously permissible and the outright dangerous, goes on to ritual magic designed to ...”

“... For Eliot, as for many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a ...”

“... frends and kindsfolks that are neare about Her Majestie must prosecute yt to the uttermost of oure powers.’ It is not surprising that he was liked only by those from whom he sought favour. The romantic and the dewy-eyed might want to invent a love affair between the ageing queen and the handsome nephew of her former governess to explain Ralegh’s rise to ...”

“... Richard Evans’s history of the Third Reich – it will be completed by a third volume covering the war – is an invaluable work of synthesis. The mass of specialist studies we now have makes a general history all the more useful, and not only, as Evans suggests, for those who know little about the subject. Evans, a social historian, aims to cover ‘not only politics, diplomacy and military affairs but also society, the economy, racial policy, police and justice, literature, culture and the arts ...”

“... between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods. In his history of the Five Eyes system, Richard Kerbaj goes back to 1938, when an MI5 officer decided to tip off the US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the ...”

“... it, to discover beneath its apparent unity the actual, irreducible forces that comprise it. What Richard Rorty called the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, which was repealed subsequently in literary theory, was driven by the conviction that the only thing real in the subject was language, and that the only way for humanists to compete with scientists was ...”

“... Olive’s vision of Africa was pastoral and republican. On the other side were principalities and powers, the ‘wild dogs of gold’. ‘All my friends (liberals) from home write saying there cannot be war,’ she tells her brother in July 1899. ‘But for us there is a worse possibility than war, that of slowly falling into the hands of speculators.’ On 9 ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... through the war, though they were rather eclipsed in 1916 by John Buchan’s Greenmantle, in which Richard Hannay bluffed his way to Constantinople to prevent a wild Islamic prophet, backed by Germany, from setting the East in flames. In the real world the Germans were backing a more potent troublemaker by smuggling Lenin to St Petersburg, thus establishing ...”