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“... of recherché locutions (mouvance, primum movens, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, coup de main, plumpes Denken, kataplexis, animus pugnandi, lapsus calami, ante diem, to cite just a few from this book). Two great works of historical synthesis, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, both published in 1974, earned ...”

“... Is she a prostitute? Not really, but she isn’t a wife either (at least not the wife of the man she is having the affair with). She is something in between. She may be a girlfriend who hopes to parlay her position into that of wife when the opportunity arises. She may be a kind of second spouse, who lives with all the trappings of domesticity and bears ...”

“... makes up a word: sound, appearance, texture, the way it is articulated or intoned. Take ‘Larmes de jeune fille’ (1947), which Isou wrote after his move to Paris :M dngoun, m diahl Θ1hna îouhsn îoun înhlianhl M2pna iouvgaîn set i ouf! saî iaffln plt i clouf! mglaî vafΛ3o là îhî cnn vîisnoubidi î pnn mîiA4gohà îhîhî gnn gîThe Greek ...”

“... through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many years of genteel prosperity, selling his ...”

“... Scots and Caledonian Antisyzygy. More than once he was accused of dictionary-grubbing: the drunk man looking at a thistle speaks under the influence of Jamieson’s – the dictionary, not the Scotch. There’s disingenuousness also in that Whitmanesque world-embrace: like most poets who wrote in dialect, MacDiarmid used it to nourish his identity with the ...”

“... from the 80-year-old daughter of one of his victims, General van Tongeren: Barbie was a small man, with a healthy look and a smooth face. His face was square, but rounded at the corners. The most striking thing about that face was the bitter, tight lips, like a thin slash across his face from which now and then a cutting, sarcastic remark emerged. And his ...”

“... Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots? My natural bent is to think that he is chatting the man up: I do not find him saying such things in his official correspondence with Paris; nor do I find that on such grounds kings and councillors made their decisions about the destinies of state and church. Not Queen Elizabeth, who would surely have giggled if ...”

“... moment in his career. His most utopian vision of future socialism, the work coincided with the old man’s forced departure from his paper (in which it was serialised), the Commonweal, and with his resignation from the Socialist League, ousted as a sentimental fogey by the new militant generation of theorised anarchists. Thereafter, Morris’s few remaining ...”

“... that is too strong,’ Leclerc reiterated a month later. He seemed to fear that the deported man might suddenly reappear. His very presence in the colony, he warned, would once again set it alight. Toussaint died of exposure and tuberculosis in 1803. Every Haitian schoolchild knows his last words by heart: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San ...”

“... interviews as tirelessly as ever, but the years went by and the brief first volume of the Histoire de la Sexualité, published in 1976, was still without its projected sequels. As the world’s eyes turned increasingly upon him, he seemed more and more reluctant to commit himself to the permanence of print. Most of one and about half of another of those ...”

“... Sure enough, Jesus appeared to the 16-year-old Moon and informed him that he was the chosen man, thus making him one of the hundred-plus messiahs Korea had spawned in only a century. According to Moon’s official biography, he then gained a degree as an electrical engineer at Waseda University in Japan (though the university has no record that he was ...”

“... tall, slender volumes in which, year by year and parish by parish, priests recorded every man, woman and child in the city, their attempts to spell foreign names providing not a few problems for the modern researcher. Widening his field of enquiry to the whole Italian peninsula and the whole of the 18th century, Brinsley Ford then began to read and ...”

“... pages of the magazine, then only recently transformed by its odd and near invisible editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Betjeman’s jocular, impressionable soul was temporarily stolen by the hard men of the Modern Movement. Then, after Betjeman resigned, along came Pevsner, to hammer home the determinist message with which the magazine was obsessed. Or that is ...”

“... animal cunning; the son takes her side and does the necessary (‘It’s up to me to be the man of the house’), but she is allowed only two poems to voice her own complaints. It is left to her son to do most of the accusing: It was a fugitive childhood. Aged four, I was chased round and round the table by my father, who fell and broke his arm he was ...”

“... men might be more interesting than their books his book was definitely more interesting than its man. Conversely, there are good writers who are nonetheless more interesting to read about than to read, and Mrs Gaskell is one of them. Few Victorians would have been more agreeable to encounter, less likely to disappoint, intimidate, or merely bore. She was ...”