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“... the questions on race relations were especially insistent. After some forty minutes of doing my best as a striving white liberal, I turned the tables and asked the students about Gypsies – whom only one girl in the whole class could tell me of, because she was one. Political leaders, however, don’t generally talk to students, and never discover the ...”

“... Moore a week earlier. First, that paper was on quite a different subject, ‘Do we love ourselves best?’: so Levy’s inability to find anything in it corresponding to the claim Russell attacks is beside the point. And, second, Russell explicitly says (in a passage that Levy actually quotes) that he is addressing the content of Moore’s lectures in ...”

“... skill with Leibniz, the astronomers Johannes Hevelius and John Flamsteed, the cartographer Nicholas Mercator and, most disastrously, with Newton, who, Hooke claimed, had plagiarised from him the inverse-square law of gravitation. If you crossed Hooke’s interests, you were in for some of the ripest abuse going: his enemies were, variously, ‘ignorant ...”

“... too, praised the work of Titian while castigating the ‘bad colours’ Lotto had used in his St Nicholas altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. So, for three centuries after his death, Lotto was the painter who wasn’t Titian, the Venetian who hadn’t stayed in Venice. His work was peculiar, imperfect, damaged by his personality and by the ...”

“... chimney, funneling the flames’. ‘Great crowds gathered to see the spectacle,’ according to Nicholas Fogg in his history of Stratford: ‘At four o’clock in the afternoon the roof fell in, and by the following morning the building was a blackened shell.’Afterwards a telegram arrived from George Bernard Shaw: ‘You must be ...”

“... on the left, unshackled from Cold War groupthink: Asli Bâli, Aziz Rana, Jeanne Morefield, Nicholas Mulder, Christy Thornton, Daniel Bessner, Stephen Wertheim, Samuel Moyn et al. Their views share a sense of the incapacity of US force to achieve the lofty objectives invested in it, and their prescriptions range from an immediate moratorium on military ...”

“... Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and ...”

“... It is a small world in which there is no alternative to nationalism. Deane would reply that the best alternative is republicanism, but it is harder to split Irish republicanism from nationalism than it is to believe (as only an Irishman would) in the existence of ‘British nationalism’. The constitutional and cultural muddle of English, Welsh, Scottish ...”

“... the physical evidence of this overturning of the ‘natural’ order of things. Traditionally the best-provided Soviet city, it became one of the worst as farmers and suppliers consumed in their regions produce once ordered to be sent to the capital. The budget deficit now began to grow and grow. Less than 3 per cent of the GNP in 1986, it had jumped to 11 ...”

“... towards GPs, who must inevitably take a wider view of the health needs of their community. As Nicholas Timmins puts it in The Five Giants (1996), we now saw hospital ‘consultants sending GPs Christmas cards, not the other way around’. Second, Thatcher’s Health of the Nation plans, with targets set for cutting diseases such as breast cancer and heart ...”

“... tradition that Shakespeare acted the part of Hamlet’s ghostly father (first mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née ...”

“... local currency. ‘My ideas are very English. I’ve thrown in my lot with England. It’s the best country in the world.’ Such loyal self-deprecation is scarcely less suspect. The Crooked Timber of Humanity is more an elegant restatement than a substantial addition to his characteristic themes. Three quarters of the book consists of essays from the same ...”

“... family. Sinclair offers a fetching portrayal of this world, dividing its genius between ‘the two best scalpers of their generation’: Nicholas Lane, a former rock musician who survives on cocaine, and Dryfeld, a figure who found his name in the Whitechapel Library. Without fixed abode or even substantial bodily form, Lane ...”

“... Farnese an extreme example of a muscle man. It was indeed the language of the body which could best be studied in these famous exemplars: the taut athletic posture of the Borghese Warrior, the sensuous relaxation of the Barberini Faun, the ebbing life of the Dying Gladiator exemplified the expressive potentialities of the male nude, which greatly extended ...”

“... himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it, as the general peace of society will permit.’ The publication of such sentiments in February 1793, a few weeks after the execution of Louis XVI, seemed to ...”