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“... a value on titles,’ he purred, ‘and I go with the great stream of life.’ Another member was David Garrick, who grew up alongside Johnson in provincial Lichfield, and shot to prominence in his twenties for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the ...”

“... talent for making viscerally real what was for many readers the abstraction of slavery. As David Blight puts it in his excellent new biography, he ‘learned how to leave them weeping’.But the Narrative’s publication also threatened Douglass’s safety. He was still a slave who could legally be recaptured – easily, since the book identified him ...”

“... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...”

“... in it or not’. Similarly, Cole’s Oxford colleague A.L. Rowse – then on the left – held views that Attlee found ‘infantile’. Dogged pragmatism, gardening and cricket were more his line; Nye Bevan carped that he brought ‘to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match’. The ...”

“... dictatorship of Napoleon III), while it makes little sense to say that the populist Nazis held aristocratic values and beliefs. Nevertheless, in the 1970s and 1980s this idea of modern German history swept all before it. As late as 1987, a doctoral dissertation at Bielefeld University on the Nazi policy of killing off the mentally ill ascribed the ...”

“... of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely admires) and he adopts its final two words as a subtitle for his biography. What sense Shakespeare attached to them is doubtful. Johnson suggests ‘likely to die in ...”

“... take a different view as to whether, in this context, the word ‘Marxist’ was, or might be held to be, defamatory by a jury. To this uncertainty is added another: the cost. Who knows what damages may be awarded? Who knows at the start of a libel action what the lawyers’ bills will turn out to be? The Daily Mail defended a case against the ...”

“... now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of ...”

“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”

“... the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret Thatcher’s eventual victory enabled her to consolidate a free-market programme of deregulation that would soon merge with the wider international movement of neoliberalism. The ...”

“... and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law on gambling in Britain remained ...”

“... to photograph Emma Hamilton’s ‘attitudes’, curiosity about those poses and why they were held to be so affecting would be satisfied. He found, I guess, the business of making the ‘surrealised portraits’ and others with backgrounds of blown up scripts and press cuttings, or the double exposures, or the photographic collages, or the pictures of ...”

“... If they’re good enough for Harold Koh, they’re good enough for me.’ Koh recently held a visiting professorship at NYU Law School, where this spring a handful of students wrote an open letter questioning his fitness to teach human rights. Koh’s defenders immediately responded with a letter of their own signed by dozens of legal ...”

“... there was an achievement in his resistance. ‘Is this man simply not cut out for the job?’ David Cameron asked at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Unlike the subject of his biography, Brown has held high office, but he’s a less successful public speaker, he doesn’t have Maxton’s enormous smile and he doesn’t ...”

“... located at the ‘addresses’ we type into our browsers. All .uk domain names, for example, are held on a database run by a not-for-profit private company called Nominet, which is based in Oxford. When you type https://www.lrb.co.uk into your browser, a few packets of data are sent via your internet service provider to Nominet’s database, which sends them ...”