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“... God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time Inkling Hugo Dyson cried. John Wain, an attendee at meetings in the late 1940s, described his heart sinking as Tolkien appeared at Lewis’s door with a bulging jacket pocket, yet again. Tolkien looked down on Lewis’s Narnia, which he thought had been created with insufficient ...”

“... longer had any need to be near ports; places with cheaper land and cheaper labour could outcompete major population centres on price. The economic geography of the whole world was changed by the TEU.The effect on labour was equally profound. The biggest aircraft carrier in the world, the US navy’s Nimitz class, is 333 metres long and displaces 106,300 ...”

“... in L’Avenir dure longtemps, a self-deconstructing text if ever there was one, in which the major premise that his parents failed him is belied by his admissions of his father’s humour and intelligence, and of his mother’s concerned affection for himself. Nor do Althusser’s attempts to make us believe that as a philosopher he was a fraud, having ...”

“... promiscuous sexuality’ were the hallmarks of these years, that gender relations underwent a major shift, and that all this was connected with the decline of strict puritan religion and the fading of patriarchalism. Yet it is possible to construct a very different picture of sex and marriage in this same era by looking at relationships other than the ...”

“... anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s ...”

“... well with the tribulations invariably suffered by British politicians and generals at the onset of major wars; unlike his father, however, war was not his métier. In the 1800s he was poor, mishandling the issue of Catholic Emancipation, which led to his resignation (a matter he also mishandled); and on his return to office three years later he decided not to ...”

“... were also a frequent trigger. In the 1860s the High Church principles of Thomas Keble (brother of John Keble, a leading figure in the Tractarian movement) became unpopular in his Gloucestershire parish, producing resentment that might have exacerbated opposition to the enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for ...”

“... points and a fourth hanging from one of the rubies. It was commissioned as a shoulder-clasp by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, ‘years before his murder’ in 1467, and passed through various hands, including those of Elizabeth I – she can be seen wearing the jewel in the ‘Ermine Portrait’ that hangs in Hatfield House – until it was finally ...”

“... Medieval political theorists devoted anguished thought to these questions. In the 12th century, John of Salisbury urged tyrannicide as a political duty. ‘Whoever does not prosecute’ a tyrant, he wrote in his Policraticus, ‘transgresses against himself and against the whole body’ of the republic. In 1407 his theory was put to the test when ...”

“... Middlemarch, this ‘line of work is very deep indeed’.Few are better suited to this work than John Guillory, the deep man’s deep man. His Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, published in 1993, is one of the most admired and influential studies in the humanities in recent decades. The hallmark of his work has been to engage ...”

“... of working assumptions that enables critical commentary? In Patrick Parrinder’s account of this major change in contemporary culture, the theorist is seen as a presumptuous upstart who has forgotten his place. The traditional role of the critic is to act as middleman between author and reader – ‘making sense’ of difficult or elusive novels, poems and ...”

“... indeed a general disassembling of Labour’s old class coalition, and the possibility of a major schism as the successful meritocrats inevitably broke away. Even allowing for the fact that they represented a more substantial group of meritocrats in the electorate at large, could Labour’s meritocrats possibly provide the basis for a new party? One ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...”

“... Huygens. In them he dismisses Hobbes’s claim to have transformed geometry by a number of major discoveries, such as that the value of pi is the square root of ten, as ‘absurd childish nonsense’. Hobbes believed geometry was the queen of sciences because nobody contested the truth of geometrical proofs. It must have been deeply embarrassing for ...”

“... about our recent cyber incident’.As you may be aware, we are currently experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber attack. Following confirmation that this was a ransomware attack, we’re aware that some data have been leaked. While this appears to be from our internal HR files, we recommend that if you have a British Library ...”