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“... sin beyond belief’, but wants them greened out of existence (almost literally – like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Cohn’s island’s vegetation has vivid accesses of post-nuclear lushness). The old Thunderer has turned ecologist and technocrat, and his vendetta against man retains some of that insouciance which impels some deities old and new to ...”

“... But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his work, but the ever-catholic Perkins gives a sympathetic introduction. How far, though, is the book a history? By continual cross-cutting, Perkins gives an idea ...”

“... as a representative extract for much longer and more elaborate babblings, such as the full text of John Berryman’s ‘Step One’, prelude to the general confession he made for Alcoholics Anonymous, wherein the sufferer relates all the harm he has done himself and others. If the day ever comes when I pin that document above my typewriter, it will be because ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”

“... a tinge of abjection, servants were to be called ‘domestic workers’ and their mistresses and masters would for the first time be ‘employers’. While DWU members wanted ‘a union such as the miners have’, many of their demands reflected the peculiarly intimate nature of living in. Better food, the right to use the same bathrooms as their ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”

“... New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by ...”

“... then sow doubt in an effort to depress it’. Chanos told me he was ‘shown the door by my German masters’. ‘Short selling’ is selling shares or other financial instruments that you don’t own, or own only temporarily – shares, for example, that have been borrowed from another investor. Chanos was – and still is – short selling shares that seem ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... RIA began to change. The live streams of trials stopped. Hope for a rebellion against the new masters faded when a poll inside the organisation showed that some two-thirds of employees didn’t care what ideology prevailed: it was just a job. ‘At Moscow State Journalism School they have people like Deputy Minister of Communications Volin telling ...”

“... source of woe. In exile from Marian England and toiling reluctantly as a corrector in Basel, John Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained ...”

“... in The Wealth of Nations, ‘seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.’ It takes an especially gifted casuist to convert such sentiments into Thatcherspeak, though it can be done. A further incongruity comes into focus in Nicholas Phillipson’s splendid biography: that the 18th-century moral philosopher bore ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... confident that it would not, but two of the British Chiefs of Staff, Field Marshal Slim and Sir John Slessor, warned that ‘there was a real likelihood and danger of the Chinese taking this action.’ A million-strong Chinese Army duly flung the US back, Truman began fingering the nuclear trigger and Attlee flew in panic to Washington to stop him. This ...”

“... full of demands for it. But it is also most unlikely that the domineering minister of justice, John Vorster, would have left such a key decision to De Wet. Vorster was Van den Bergh’s boss and the two men were close. It seems far more likely that Vorster, probably after discussion with Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister, decided it would not be politic ...”