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“... Cornelia, in earlier years, had enjoyed a brief flirtation with Shelley before her husband, Thomas Turner, carried her out of danger to a remote corner of Devon. Her letters, edited by the late Felicitas Corrigan, allude to ‘dear Shelley’ with near risible frequency; like Teresa Guiccioli, Cornelia Turner wanted nobody to forget that she had been ...”

“... tried to be even-handed with respect to the duelling religious orders. Among his six are St Thomas of Canterbury (Chaucer’s ‘hooly blisful martir’); St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian mystic; St Francis of Assisi; and St Dominic, less charismatic but a better administrator, whose Domini canes (‘hounds of the Lord’) served as ...”

“... point holds good. I am reminded of a radio interview in which the ultra-conservative cleric Edward Norman, then dean of Peterhouse, tried unsuccessfully to cajole the Reverend Ian Paisley into a declaration that liberalism was the root of all evil. Paisley was not to be budged from his own hobbyhorse; of course liberalism was an abomination, but ...”

“... is the most ‘European’ of Roth’s novels, and the tone of this passage will strike readers of Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka as familiar, perhaps even jadedly so. Yet the intensity of the commitment to Keatsian negative capability is remarkable in a writer so insistently loyal to the American novel’s covenant with quotidian, lived life. It is no small part ...”

“... of the Eurasian land-mass’ is one of the keys to appreciating his vast, multi-volume project on Edward Gibbon and his contexts. The subject matter of the sequence, titled Barbarism and Religion, is not simply Gibbon’s masterwork, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88): it expands beyond Gibbon to include the world of ...”

“... in Redland, in a house now part of the university. In his teens, Sidgwick went to Rugby. Although Thomas Arnold had died in 1841, the school retained the impress of his high-minded and reforming personality, and Sidgwick’s mother overcame her doubts about English boarding schools – though she took up residence in a house opposite the school, which ...”

“... Lincolnshire clergyman, a 19-year-old Harrovian and a Chamonix guide. They were the casualties of Edward Whymper’s successful assault on the Matterhorn in 1865, lost during the descent; a tragedy supposedly honoured by nature with an enormous fog-bow, incorporating two crosses. Whymper survived with two Swiss guides, father and son. The English chaplain of ...”

“... habits of early 20th-century London. The paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd ...”

“... was entirely faithful: he had a notorious roving eye and she a serious relationship with Colonel Thomas Tweed, a political associate of Lloyd George’s, in the late 1920s. Her relationship with Lloyd George was, however, passionate and lasting, bringing happiness to both of them. It also burdened Stevenson with as many as three abortions before she finally ...”

“... What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide ...”

“... Halford Mackinder and J.C. van Leur, to more culturally oriented recent readings such as those of Edward Said. In a few pages, he efficiently summarises the large and complex debate on the idea of modernity, rejecting the forceful advice of the Africanist Frederick Cooper by concluding that ‘it is too useful an idea to be thrown away,’ but adding that ...”

“... into observations, experiments and improvements that helped save lives on the front line. Thomas Johnson, a royalist apothecary and botanist who died at the siege of Basing House in Hampshire, had been a great ‘herborizer’ before the war. He went on plant-hunting expeditions throughout England and Wales, and in 1633 edited John Gerard’s famous ...”

“... satellites, which appear as faint streaks across his dark prints. (As in the first line of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, ‘a screaming comes across the sky,’ only here the screaming is silent.) Apart from intelligence-gathering in the present, the satellites are also space debris of the future, even eventual artefacts of an extinct ...”

“... paranoia about cancellable offences everyone might already be committing without realising it. Edward Said once wrote that Conrad was incapable of seeing beyond imperialism, since it monopolised the entire system of representation, but that he could express self-consciousness as an outsider. No degree of estrangement, however, was sufficient to save Conrad ...”

“... order’. Gildea’s title gives us one of his own keywords: ‘backbone’. The Scottish miner Thomas Watson, when interviewed by Gildea, recalled his father often saying that ‘the miners are the backbone of the nation.’ Coal was central to the industrial economy, powering homes, factories, land and sea transport, steel production and electricity ...”