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“... had uprooted the blacks from their native culture, then sold parents and children to different masters. The historian Stanley Elkins darkened the picture by comparing slavery to the Holocaust. Like European Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, the American blacks had been so traumatised by the loss of all their old ‘family and kinship arrangements ...”

“... this: an 1886 lettter from Kipling (21 and still a journalist in India) to Crofts, one of his old masters at Westward Ho!; a scatter of references in letters to his son John at school (c. 1912) about avoiding chaps who engage in ‘beastliness’; a 1917 letter to an unidentified friend about the friend’s son (or ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... the act’ is fine. Indeed, ‘we might see Bloom as a proper hero of sexual modernity for, since Masters and Johnson, masturbation has become a familiar index of sexual normality, or, as one historian puts it, “the ultimate criterion of correct social behaviour”.’ (The historian, I learn a hundred pages later, is Paul Robinson.) Brown won’t leave ...”

“... Córdoba had often practised circumcision and avoided pork, in imitation of their Muslim masters. The Sephardim who left Spain in 1492 rather than convert were still extraordinarily conscious of their Spanish identity, and sought to impose the Castilian language (in the form of Ladino or Judco-Spanish) on the communities among whom they settled along ...”

“... thirties. He wasn’t experimental, at least not in the beguiling fashion of the far better known John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with ...”

“... he hadn’t actually been able to finish Gaddis’s JR; he preferred the Brontës. He found new masters. From Proust he learned to let a story extend slowly over long stretches of time. From Edith Wharton, that a ‘good way to write a book is to define a character by what he or she wants’ – something that hadn’t occurred to him before. His sentences ...”

“... straw sun hats for horses, strappers who specialised in vigorous grooming, ostlers at inns, riding masters, horsebreakers and common or garden grooms. In the same way that the horse left its mark on the titles of the aristocracy of Europe, the Ritters, Cabelleros and Chevaliers, so it marked the surnames of the ordinary man: the ...”

“... discomforts of the working class – ‘are more annoyed by hardships and rough living than their masters.’ It was far more ‘agreeable and advantageous’ to hire a local, so long as no antiquarian knowledge was expected, let alone trusted if offered. For that, (hand)books were the thing. It is hard to imagine that this advice was followed to the ...”

“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... like Swift’s Gulliver, would make of today’s Americans. Delegated by God to be the masters of the universe, convinced of their moral superiority, they find it easy to slaughter both the guilty and the innocent with no remorse and continue to maintain, despite all the evidence, that there is no relation between cause and effect. Even stranger is ...”

“... lunching and drinking) when she joined the agency in the 1970s. Perhaps they really were masters of disguise. Or, more likely, they were just saying what the wiser heads in the British government wanted to hear, committed as they were to decolonisation, ill able to afford many more costly counter-insurgencies like Malaya and Kenya, and only too ...”

“... At school, children were exposed from an early age to the letters of Cicero and other classical masters. Those nervous or incapable of writing like this, could, as Richardson had discovered to his profit early in his publishing career, purchase volumes of model letters in English, replete with flourishes and sentiments often alien to the sender, but part ...”

“... says, he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”

“... and Mies were bourgeois professionals, while Meyer was a communist. The artists designated ‘masters’ at the Bauhaus, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, were no less diverse, as were the few women who rose to prominence through the workshops. That rise was rare in art schools of the time; today, however, the textiles of Anni ...”