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“... quality of the switch – almost had me tumbling. Which? Does it mean what it says or say what it means? Does it matter? Carroll says: ‘As she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t matter much which way she put it.’ Well, it does matter, I think, though I’m not totally sure. One seems to be a category (unfortunately) within the discipline of ...”

“... Valentin: You mean one sex inserted into another?Paul Eluard: As you know very well, to make love means to ejaculate.Albert Valentin: What does making love mean? Confused interruptionsAndré Thirion: At present, I love someone: no a priori representation. At other times, I had preferences.Yves Tanguy: I can make love in every way. I prefer ...”

“... alarming fissures, and the almost simultaneous attempts to impose the will of Parliament (by means of the Stamp Acts) and the will of the Church (in the shape of a colonial bishop) on the colonies were signs, not of the strength, but rather of the weakness, of British sovereignty in America. The colonists bemoaned these belated movements in a common ...”

“... monarchy and the imperial monarchy, then we can better discern the varied and interconnected means whereby the British throne has survived and adapted: bread and circuses, home and away. And of these new activities, changed identities and invented justifications, this charitable Crown has so successfully and so completely intruded itself into the ...”

“... work is brutalising and numbingly repetitive. It is especially indecent that the common-or-garden means of life are now at the mercy of profiteering. In Hertfordshire, it was reported in March, great numbers of people had to boil their water. The Three Valleys Water Company is now having to introduce expensive machinery to filter out pesticides. Ten years ...”

“... Marxism and its Leninist inversion value political debate and rhetoric only insofar as they are a means to their own ultimate withering away. As for the notion that ‘bourgeois humanist’ politics is simply a disguise for laissez-faire capitalism, J.G.A. Pocock and other historians have been pointing to abundant evidence that the ethos of commercial ...”

“... Moran, ‘the blind Dublin ballad-maker’ who died in 1846). All this attention to Gaelic arcana means we can’t help feeling the smoke of the féth fíada in our eyes from time to time, as in the entry for ‘Incantata”s ‘Thane of Calder’, Samuel Beckett. By concentrating on the Irish background to Gabriel’s surname in ‘The Dead’, Muldoon ...”

“... of the overall impact of Lourdes on French politics. To the extent that Lourdes was an effective means of mobilisation for the extreme Catholic Right – and Harris leaves very little doubt that it was extremely effective – it directly strengthened the forces of reactionary monarchism and anti-Semitism. In most cases, a secular observer ‘converted’ by ...”

“... in maleficium, the curse or spell that led to death or disease; but English villagers had other means of identifying witches. They believed that all witches were accompanied by familiars, demonic animals who fed on their blood by sucking on witches’ ‘teats’ (warts or skin growths, these were very different from the invisible stigma diaboli – patches ...”

“... enlist Modernism as an opponent of the dominant ideology of Englishness. Their argument is by no means facile, but it does encourage some curious distortions. We are told, for example, that Robert Bridges’s editing of the proto-Modernist poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins accommodated their dangerous excess to a ‘prevailing orthodoxy’, and ...”

“... elections and party warfare something which can be called continuous contract. Continuous contract means, simply, the fine measurement of opinion and its careful management by propaganda, together with the creation of a degree of mystification about the political process, in the interests of harmonious government. Mr Middlemas’s third new insight is less ...”

“... in the region of two million pounds, which made him rich by the standards of the time, but by no means fabulously wealthy. Surprisingly enough, it was during the reign of that most dull, dim and dutiful of monarchs, King George V, that royal tax exemption took off. In 1910, when he was eager to conciliate the new monarch at the time of the constitutional ...”

“... Malcolm is the most discreet of editors, never intruding his own views, and this self-effacement means, unfortunately, that we cannot yet be sure what he thinks we have to learn from these letters. He has long been working on a biography of Hobbes; only when it appears will we know what larger conclusions he believes can be drawn from the detailed evidence ...”

“... could be punished for failing to deal with sharks, over which he had no power, surely this crisis means that many political careers, indeed entire political movements, are on the line. By the autumn differences between national death rates ought to give voters all the information they need to determine whether these are the people they want to be making life ...”

“... for instance, but they are more often given to two players, who must listen to each other. By no means all European music is predominantly contrapuntal; much of it is melody with harmony, the kind of music that has the widest popular appeal. Even a complex piece such as a Beethoven symphony will almost always have a main melodic line that you can sing or ...”