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“... and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build.’Joyce’s friend John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to ...”

“... note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with John, the beloved disciple, and that all men who did not love tobacco and boys were fools, Marlowe’s own bias seems unusually clear. Sexual relations between man and man (or man and beast) became a capital offence in England in 1533. Demoted briefly to the ...”

“... moment was perhaps the publication, while Skinner was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...”

“... and depressed’, and criticises him on another occasion for possible tactlessness – talking too freely in front of his own mother. Williams is a good character witness: ‘What is heart? If we’re talking about compassion and sympathy, I’d say Joe had it. He showed tremendous loyalty to Halliwell.’ And while Peggy Ramsay, Orton’s agent, noted that ...”

“... and butterflies to realise Titania’s fairy attendants accurately and Victorian artists such as John Anster Fitzgerald also borrowed features from the insect world to make their fairylands convincing. Today, through the ingenuities of CGI, many of these hybrids now speak and weep, appearing convincingly embodied and entirely sentient. Entertainments, from ...”

“... the 1970 ‘School Kids Issue’ of Oz. The classic defence tactic was used of having counsel – John Mortimer QC – representing two of the editors and arguing issues of law, while the other, Richard Neville, represented himself and said things that lawyers were not permitted to say (though Mortimer was at his fluent best when not talking about the ...”

“... nihilistic conflict unfolding in Liberia and the surrounding region, involving armed youths moving freely between four countries. The document is an implicit criticism of those in the international community who for years have concentrated on excoriating President Taylor and given the impression that removing one man from power could in itself solve a ...”

“... or less confused in 18th-century Europe, when townspeople flocked to watch the oculists perform. John Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did Taylor’s ...”

“... the Netherlands, or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had always had this as its ultimate aim – ‘Empire into Commonwealth’, as the history books used to put it. If for no other reason, the myth was needed in order to ...”

“... All the same, being a gentlewoman was not just a matter of having money, but also of spending it freely, showering or at least sprinkling one’s dependants with largesse. An early reader of her accounts, her great-nephew Henry Jeffreys, was disgusted by her spending. As he saw it, her poor judgment and thoughtless generosity wrecked the fortune she had ...”

“... with him (his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie de Champagne), and circulated freely on both sides of the Channel. Where we have a name for a writer, such as Chrétien de Troyes or Hue de Rotelande, we have at least an indication of their origins – one safely French, one from the marches of Wales (modern Rhuddlan) – but when a work is ...”

“... adorned with the most precious jewels, and, as we have come to expect, there is plenty of food freely available: The geese roasted on the spit Fly to that abbey, God knows, Crying: ‘Geese, all hot! All hot!’ Although sexual pleasure is secondary in the Dutch Cockaigne texts, here the monks enjoy plenty of it. The abbot gathers the monks to their ...”

“... avoiding paraphrasable meaning altogether. One need only point to the work of Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery to show how successfully some of it sustains our expectations while ultimately refusing to deliver the semantic goods. Having extracted a poem’s point, runs the usual defence of such teasing evasions, readers will have no further use for the poem ...”