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“... had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, the quintessence of home seen from abroad. Home can be a bit smug, though; and sometimes constricting. The poetic celebrants of home at the moment tend not to be ...”

“... the rest of Hong Kong, ‘ceded in perpetuity’, back to mother China. That lion-hearted Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who died while he was trying to solve the Irish Question, said of the First Opium War, which ended with Hong Kong under British rule: ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with ...”

“... of which British poets should be honoured by inclusion in the book. Such behaviour, as William St Clair amply demonstrates in his magnificent, original and compelling study, was characteristic of the London publishers. His book stretches far wider than its title suggests. He has a mass of new and fascinating things to say about the centuries that ...”

“... confuses Samuel Johnson the writer with Dr Johnson the ogre and bully portrayed by Boswell. James Murray, the author of the OED, succumbed to the same confusion, perhaps, when in a dream he imagined that Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish mood, asked ‘What would you say, Sir, if you were told that in a hundred years’ time a ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”

“... semi-darkness below deck? They must have known how poor their chances of success were. Lord George Murray, who would become the prince’s military commander, wrote to a brother: ‘My Life, my Fortune, my expectations, the Happiness of my wife & children, are all at stake, & the chances are against me, & yet a principle of … Honour, & my Duty to King and ...”

“... of the couple’s acrimonious separation. Byron’s side of the story went up in smoke in John Murray’s grate when the poet’s publisher presided over the burning of his memoirs. If we want Byron’s relationships with those who knew him, why should we not just read his often wonderful letters? One answer might be that Leslie Marchand’s 12-volume ...”

“... legacy of the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ (Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray and A.B. Cook, turn-of-the-century classicists who had written on the connection between Greek myth and ritual and the origins of drama), and had then read a good deal of Frazer, who influenced the Ritualists greatly. The project held many ...”

“... to the widespread use of Blair’s Rhetoric in the United States. By the early 1760s, the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon ...”

“... he wrote, ‘are getting sick of the subject – and a good job too.’ But here it is. Joseph Murray’s book was compiled from his diaries and letters home while serving first as a seaman and then as a sapper in Gallipoli. It was originally published in 1965 as Gallipoli as I Saw It, and contains a flinch-making description of him amputating his mate’s ...”

“... Protection of Science and Learning, but he too was rounded up as an ‘enemy alien’. As Oswyn Murray reports, ‘it is alleged that when Momigliano presented himself at Oxford Police Station, he was asked to empty his pockets, and extracted John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty.’ He was duly sent to the Isle of Man. There was a separate camp for ...”

“... in the process.When the Stadthouder Willem III of Orange ascended the English throne as King William I with his wife Mary, a condition was set by Parliament that he relinquish control over public finance. The English and then the British national debt was the first to be guaranteed by an assembly with the power to levy taxes, not by the credit of the ...”

“... There were​ high hopes for the son of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, the grandson of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, but the boy told his mother that all he wanted was a quiet life and a sailing boat. She wasn’t wholly disappointed at his failure to distinguish himself. When it was suggested at school that he needed to learn to think for himself, Mary Shelley said: ‘Oh God, teach him to think like other people!’ Percy Florence was unusual in a uniformly cerebral family ...”

“... Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry are sensitive, as Nicholas Murray points out, to the ‘strangeness of his genius’, and avoid tidy ideological categories. We need to attend to the ‘uncanny tremor of implication’ that makes the lucid surfaces of his poems ‘shimmer with a sense of something undefined and ...”

“... that is now infecting schools and public services. Reactionary intellectuals such as Douglas Murray have identified Black feminist theories of ‘intersectionality’ as the root of the West’s current malaises. This rhetoric is far from harmless, as attested by the censorship of gender studies by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, and similar ...”