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“... 1936 they had to abandon Chelsea for something more modest. At this low moment Joyce was asked by Peter Fleming, then a leader-writer on the Times, to help enliven the Court Page, whose only light relief from the comings and goings at the Palace was a series of articles about flora and fauna – ‘Woody Plants for Limey Soil’ or ‘Family Cares of the ...”

“... context of the religious drama being played out in England, or of various prophetic movements in France, the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere. At the very beginning of his messianic career, he was identified, for example, in a Polish pamphlet as a Quaker-Jew, and a contemporary woodcut from Germany labelled ‘the two great impostors’ shows him facing ...”

“... might have done even a few years ago.Deemed a ‘barbaric fiction’, civil death was abolished in France in 1854, yet residual interdictions persisted there, in the US, and elsewhere. A criminal conviction can reduce legal personhood – the voting rights of ex-cons are disputed to this day – and people in many other categories were and are routinely ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job ...”

“... and Indonesia from East Timor were passed unanimously in the Security Council. The US, Britain, France, Russia and China supported them all to the hilt – provided, of course, that no one was expected to do anything to enforce them. Commercial interest and oil provide the only coherent explanation of US policy over Iraq. After the Iranian revolution of ...”

“... objections to Jean of Meung’s ‘continuation’ of Guillaume of Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. In France, partly because of fun and games in the Canard Enchaîné, Gerson evokes memories of clerical anguish about masturbation; students of Erasmus may also too readily accept his delight in belittling an author he had studied as a boy. Dr Brown’s approach, a ...”

“... the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries – the Europe of Anselm, Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Suger, Otto of Freising, John of Salisbury, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Roger Bacon, Snorri Sturluson, Leonardo ...”

“... in ‘want of well pronouncing shibboleth’. Rochester, perhaps, would have agreed with Lord Peter Wimsey (another post-war figure) that ‘a principle has no claim to be called a principle until it’s killed someone.’ In the end, Rochester may have become a prisoner of his own disbeliefs. Much of what he wrote may appear to have no discernible ...”

“... studies of really violent societies – 17th-century China, 18th and 19th-century France and modern Sicily. The Smorthwait-Bainbridge ‘gang’ in Cumbria in the 1680s are simply not in the same league. This case-study is intended to elucidate the following points. First, that these felons were respectable men mainly rooted in the land and in ...”

“... become a global power player, and the precondition for that would be a centralised EU led by France and Germany, in place of the current ramshackle institution where instability on the periphery – code for Greece or Portugal – could make the whole thing collapse. There is an obvious alternative to hegemony: more democracy in the EU, and Germany’s ...”

“... in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and ...”

“... New World nor the probable end of the rest of it, neither his turning 60 (as he, something of a Peter Pan, wished never to do) nor whatever thanatophile twinkle he had in his eye, enabled him to transcend his ordinary possibilities. Fowles calls it his ‘least personal biography’. Hermann Kesten, Joseph Roth’s sometime friend and fellow exile, and ...”

“... celebrated sense. Such communities are a decisive survival tool, because they embody what Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, in Not by Genes Alone (2004), have described as ‘ultra-sociality’. Human ultra-sociality is quite different from the communal networks formed among so many other species. As Durkheim showed in The Elementary Forms of Religious ...”

“... and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of ...”