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“... becoming perpetual invalids and positively encouraging hypochondria in others. Godfrey and Hope Wedgwood were classed as ‘eternally ill’. Henrietta Darwin ‘made invalidism her vocation’: having been told by her doctor to take breakfast in bed when she had a fever at the age of 13, she never took it anywhere else for the next 71 years. Other ...”

“... of the title role from Burbage to Joseph Taylor and from records of performances in the 1630s for Charles I’s court. Even after London’s playhouses were closed by the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, an anonymous adaptor produced a truncated version suitable for surreptitious performance at fairs and taverns called The Grave-Makers, which provided the ...”

“... Byron was its first and finest creation. His wife and daughter could not escape fame, they could hope only to avoid notoriety. Annabella’s attempts to preserve her reputation and other people’s attempts to salvage Byron’s have left a pall of smoke from burning letters and diaries, further obscuring the facts that remain. Seymour carries off a delicate ...”

“... liaison in a sort of perverse fashion,’ he claims. One letter he writes in the persona of ‘Charles Bovary’. ‘What does your name stand for, Dick?’ he writes in another, with the sign-off, ‘Here is mine.’ The letters might make an interesting art piece, he proposes – ‘a Calle Art piece. You know, like Sophie Calle?’ They could paste the ...”

“... Iraq considered both after Israel bombed its Osirak reactor in 1981, putting an end to any hope of using plutonium. Hamza writes: ‘The centrifuge process involved extracting bomb-grade fuel by spinning a uranium compound-gas inside a fast rotating cylinder. The lighter uranium at the centre of the cylinder is enriched by the fuel.’ This isn’t ...”

“... them to spend time on the wards and interact with the patients during their trips, in the hope that their altered state would generate therapeutic empathy and insight. The programme ran for several years. It produced new theories of visual perception and led to some freewheeling artistic collaborations, but no practicable model for mental ...”

“... I just know up from down. I just know there and back, what’s before me and what’s behind. St Charles Borromeo, behind me, is called ‘our church’. The school of St Charles Borromeo is called ‘our school’. Up ahead is Bankbottom, that is called ‘home’: I am slow with the word ‘home’, because no one says ...”

“... Palestinian commando attacks against Israel. Partly to teach the Syrians a lesson, partly in the hope of provoking a coup, Israel responded by carrying out reprisal raids, and by baiting Syrian troops in the demilitarised zones (DMZs) between the two countries. One tactic was to send armed tractors manned by soldiers dressed as farmers into the DMZs, in ...”

“... is it something that we would wish to re-read?’ I squirmed. My rebuttal was resentful. But I hope I learned that in the matter of form and inspiration, the skilful engineering of form was by no means enough. In order to introduce Timothy Steele – the other poet whose company has deeply influenced me – I’d like to quote a brief poem from his first ...”

“... The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall ...”

“... A Different Kind of War (1986), a revealing account of government propaganda. Donald Horowitz, the Charles Murphy Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, and Theo Hanf, the director of the Freiburg Bergstraesser Institut, are among the world’s leading comparative analysts of ethnic conflict. Horowitz in particular skilfully integrates a ...”

“... for some time now that Bligh was not the celluloid brute portrayed by tyrannical, lashing Charles Laughton and Trevor Howard, and Kennedy takes the process of rehabilitation a credible stage further, though his comparison of Bligh with Mother Teresa is a stage too far for me. His book amply demonstrates, to anyone who still believes in the Hollywood ...”

“... first appearance. As an essay in the history of ideas, it provides a wonderfully lucid account of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, makes more sense of Mussolini’s intellectual ambitions than most other works, and renders Hitler’s ambitions intelligible. But when Nolte attempts to explain Fascism as a ‘resistance to transcendence’, darkness tails ...”

“... object or occasion. Not that we don’t enjoy some of these essays, especially time-honoured ones: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their stage representation is as delicious as it is dated. Yet unlike Lamb’s piece, the contemporary critical essay often demands a knowledge that is highly specialised, and uses a vocabulary drawn from ...”

“... than opinions, collective behaviour in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of discovering some historical laws of circumstantial determinism. In another, it has been resurrected as psychohistory, which seeks greater intellectual respectability by becoming evidentially more sensational, probing the intimate details of men’s inner ...”