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“... ask him what the town was like in the 1970s, when the trade unions were at the height of their powers. ‘Birkenhead and Liverpool were thriving. You had Tate and Lyle. Fords. Massey Ferguson. The docks were doing great. Vauxhall Motors were permanently in the dole office in Birkenhead and Ellesmere Port, recruiting. People weren’t millionaires, but they ...”

“... Disturbance ceased to be thought of largely in terms of sin or possession by Superior or Infernal powers,’ and the way was smoothed towards more ‘secular and social mappings of madness’. In parallel with this, medical conceptualisations of mental disorder increasingly moved away from humoural accounts, towards more complex and rhetorically powerful (if ...”

“... from the genteel sisters Anne and Julia Bast in order to administer the estate of their brother Thomas, who died intestate. The sisters’ grip on relevance in conversation, and indeed reality, is far from fierce, but a family and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called Stella, and the fourth ...”

“... that Kelley was disabled in some way (and disability is traditionally associated with the psychic powers he claimed). There is a reference, during one of the séances, to his difficulty in kneeling. And then there is the question of his ears, or lack of them. This is sometimes said to be a late tradition, dating from the 18th century. It is not. It first ...”

“... Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera ...”

“... On no occasion requiring political courage did President Eisenhower show himself to be courageous. Thomas Reeves, the latest historian of McCarthyism, is very clear that McCarthy could have been stopped cold at any time, by any man with authority. It could have been J. Edgar Hoover or Nixon. It ought to have been Eisenhower. In the event, it was McCarthy who ...”

“... Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to which Sidney had belonged and in whose cause he became a martyr. Poets wrote elegies which answered to ...”

“... What a pleasure​ to return to Thomas Hardy. For about a hundred pages. Then the torment begins, and we’re not even halfway through. From now on each turn of the page will expose the reader to greater unhappiness. There’s a moment in The Return of the Native where the main character, Clym, already deeply troubled by his mother’s mysterious death, goes out of his way to find a little boy who may be able to tell him exactly what happened ...”

“... or as exuberant as he wants to sound. Cancel all debts to the Old World and then transpose its powers to a new domain. Go on, Muse, you know you want to. And the question Whitman poses shortly after this fantasy of cultural transposition indicates how and why he mattered so much to Harold Bloom: ‘We do not blame thee elder World, nor really separate ...”

“... the moment when the mother first feels kicking in the womb and, according to Thomas Aquinas, the time when a foetus becomes ‘ensouled’. Restell initially advised that because the pregnancy was so far along, Bodine should board with her at a cost of $5 a week and have the baby, but Bodine insisted on an abortion and negotiated a price ...”

“... the then Home Secretary overruled the senior judge and agreed with Jones. The Home Secretary’s powers in these kinds of case derive from the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933. Under section 53 (1) of the Act, children (defined in law as those between the ages of ten and 14) and young people (14 to 18) who are convicted of murder face a mandatory ...”

“... is the family’s great collection of paintings, including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry ...”

“... who, in 1870, already suspected that their new town might fare better if named Upton Royal. Thomas Hardy is hoisted aboard and driven past Weymouth to the Isle of Portland, a rocky place where Marie Stopes was once to be found retired among stoneworkers still accustomed to testing the fertility of potential brides before finally consenting to marry ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”

“... he found himself faced with a case of such complexity. The juge d’instruction has considerable powers: it is he who gathers information and directs the investigation. Le petit juge was not effective at either. The trouble was that Judge Lambert talked too much, and allowed everyone working for him to gossip. He also talked, with extraordinary freedom, both ...”