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“... constitutes almost an alternative story. In the first place, Porter’s title is descriptive at best of the past 150 years of a 2500-year-long story, and arguably of only the past 60 or so. Before the middle of the 19th century, clinical medicine had almost no beneficent impact on health and may well have caused more harm than good; doctors at the Battles ...”

“... he was his own boss, he threw himself into the pursuit, practising every day and seeking out the best opponents. He was a prince of exuberant physical energy, and had the height and weight to succeed at a sport so expensive and dangerous that it was still thought valid preparation for the battlefield. In jousting it’s only with a well-matched opponent that ...”

“... his ‘astonishing Vocal Illusions’ to the London public in a comedy called The Rogueries of Nicholas, featuring an accident-prone servant who runs on and off stage conducting serial dialogues with a vast imaginary cast including ailing Alderman Pillbury, amorous Captain Furlough, muling Pillbury Minimus and his big bouncy sister Flirtilla, along with ...”

“... translated Pierre Brumoy’s book of versions and commentaries, The Greek Theatre. Or even with Nicholas Udall, who wrote in 1548 of ‘young virgins so nouzled and trained in the studie of letters’ that they could ‘reade or reason … in Greke, Latine, Frenche, or Italian’. The spread of Greek literacy in the early 16th century changed the outlook of ...”

“... Free speech​ is an aberration – it is best to begin by admitting that. In most societies throughout history and in all societies some of the time, censorship has been the means by which a ruling group or a visible majority cleanses the channels of communication to ensure that certain conventional practices will go on operating undisturbed ...”

“... of Canetti’s internationalism, even his ‘Englishness’, his Shakespearean side, gives the best intuition that a non-Germanist can get of Kraus’s peculiar genius. It is, above all, a genius of commitment – to language and to emotion. That was the same with Kafka. How to combine, in art, a pure, fastidious rigour with the simplest feeling of rage ...”

“... his fear that the toil of his career and his frustrated love for Maud Gonne have consumed his best years. Cuchulain, however, suspects that the Old Man is trying to scare him away, and the two begin to wrangle, as their successors would in Purgatory. While water splashes on the stones, the Old Man sleeps and the hero is lured away by the hawk. The play ...”

“... and kind nurse. Appalled by Keats’s physical wretchedness and psychic disintegration, he did his best, wearing himself out to keep Keats alive, even against Keats’s will, even against the pressure of his own exhaustion. ‘I have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the ...”

“... time I heard him speak was over lunch, when someone mentioned an article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. What we needed to know, Page piped up, was that the New York Times was prejudiced against his boss. We really didn’t need him to come all the way from Russia to tell us that. The mystery was what he could possibly be doing on the Trump ...”

“... a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets ...”

“... others, and aid donors with limited budgets wanted to know which to prioritise. The nutritionist Nicholas Haan and his colleagues at the UN’s food security and nutrition analysis unit in Somalia developed a five-phase scale with colour-coded maps to represent a composite of three kinds of data: on households’ access to food, child malnutrition levels and ...”

“... high in early 2020. Markets were booming. He was confident of re-election, for which he thought it best to dispense with any policy platform at all. Those dreams were crushed by a crisis for which Trump was the least well suited of all recent presidents – a pandemic with obscure origins in China. He answered with erratic conspiracy theories and failed to ...”

“... Once again their ages aren’t specified, though eventually Roland is revealed as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child ...”

“... fewer children.’ The piece discusses a widely cited paper by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas published in Environmental Research Letters in which the researchers considered ‘a broad range of individual lifestyle choices’ and came up with recommendations for four ‘high impact’ actions which had ‘the potential to contribute to systemic ...”

“... of breaststroking on a kindly thermal above the lesser towers and steeples of London, like St Nicholas of Bari in the quattrocento painting by Bicci di Lorenzo in the Ashmolean. But the fantasy doesn’t quite play. The integrity of the view is broken by squared columns and the metal frames of window panels, turning the spread of the city below into a ...”