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“... after. Among much rustling of silks, a daughter decorously pours tea, while his eldest son, Thomas, just returned from the Varsity, stands behind his father in full academic dress reading, one imagines, some Latin poem. And symbolically at least, the Tyers have a special guest in their bourgeois parlour, confirming their status. On the chimneypiece is a ...”

“... Elton tells us that knowing about history does not make a man wise or endow him with prophetic powers. But trying to be a prophet can mar him as a historian. It was not Elton who said that the only lesson of history is that there are no lessons to be learned from history, but he could have said it. The historian is the ultimate sceptic, mankind’s ...”

“... and sculpture. Pietro Bembo’s concluding Neoplatonic evocation, in poetic prose, of love’s powers and properties, may seem more embarrassing than engrossing. Women appear regularly but they play strictly regulated roles, organising discussion and playfully slapping down the ill-mannered speakers who try to go too far. As always in societies governed by ...”

“... order was therefore an individual and a societal imperative. Tyndall’s main inspiration was Thomas Carlyle, along with transcendental idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Carlyle was Tyndall’s supporter at his wedding in 1876, Tyndall a pallbearer at Carlyle’s funeral in 1881.) To labour towards higher ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Plath were integral to the English poetry scene, that writers like Larkin and Graves and Dylan Thomas seemed familiar voices in America. (And it was not so many years before that when Auden and Eliot managed to scumble the boundaries of nationality altogether, giving each country some legitimate claim to serving as the poets’ true homeland.) These ...”

“... William Fox first put into circulation the term ‘super-power’ – in a book entitled The Super-Powers: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union – Their Responsibility for Peace – Britain counted as one of the three. Even then the label did not stick. The Public Record Office archives of the years up to and including 1956 are nonetheless full of ...”

“... from smaller ponds’. This battle has been played out repeatedly on different fields: as Keith Thomas showed in his magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic, there is a long history of engagement between magic and religion as definitional categories. In exemplary fashion, the classical scholar and Catholic priest, AndréJean Festugière, writing ...”

“... one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort of ...”

“... is far more impressive, by virtue of its convincing detail: but it also relies heavily on its powers of persuasion. It is much concerned to explain and interpret – the relationship, for instance, between Jewish collaboration in the running of the camp and the sacred Jewish duty to survive as long as possible. Or it will interpret suicide while awaiting ...”

“... have identified a variety of sources for Campanella’s idiosyncratic vision, from Plato to Thomas More. What no one before Noel Malcolm noticed – although it would be unmistakable to any student of the early modern Middle East – is the extent to which the city of the sun was modelled on the Ottoman Empire.From the Renaissance to the ...”

“... how many of them were sustained by the potential of their work, by the realisation of the great powers for good they could exercise for the benefit of large numbers of people. Why else did Donald Macnabb, a district officer in the Punjab, build an irrigation canal with his own money? Why else did officials work in the famine and plague camps, burying ...”

“... they took too long to do things. The Prof and his team of young economists and statisticians had powers to override departmental norms, to extract instantly the information they wanted, and – which did not add to their popularity – to nose into areas where something seemed to be wrong; Churchill once referred to the branch as ‘my ...”

“... In Scotland, it was difficult to regard her as a stooge for the English, given her detestation of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, who had been an unwelcome escort to her new husband in 1503, and who went on to command the English army which in September 1513 shattered the Scottish elite and killed King James IV at Flodden. Later she continued to be eclectic in ...”

“... to limitless wealth and resources, technology promises not only observation, but the novelist’s powers of arrangement and retroactive shaping. Lemoine’s drones cast a roving eye over spaces and individuals from above. (‘You hold the figures in your hand,’ he tells Mira of his love of flying. ‘You can see the whole scene.’) His phone-hacking ...”