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“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...”

“... last, and in some ways, best years. As a writer, he was a late starter, not publishing his first major book – The Spanish Labyrinth – until he was 50; South from Granada, his two autobiographies, St John of the Cross, Thoughts in a Dry Season and his two novels, were written between the ages of 60 and 85. In his ...”

“... changes are very occasionally rapid, but sometimes stretch over centuries. Most commonly, though, major changes become apparent within the canonical span of a human lifetime: three score years and ten. Consider the dramatic changes that have occurred in Germany in the seventy or so years since the Second World War, and the multiple, multinational consequences ...”

“... discourse. The Kennedy assassination and Operation Desert Storm are both widely perceived as major turning-points in American history, the one signalling the beginning of the Vietnam era, the other marking the transition between the end of the Cold War and the unveiling of George Bush’s ‘new world order’. Both events were also turning points in the ...”

“... In the Eighties a lot changed. Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, published in 1982, was a major catalyst. Ostensibly it called in question received views of moral development; it has since been used to subvert other and larger intellectual projects. Gilligan noted that the standard account of moral development proposed by Kohlberg (with Piaget in the ...”

“... It was one of the more gratuitous blunders of John Foster Dulles when he was Secretary of State to respond to a question about the unwillingness of Saudi Arabia to allow any American Jew to set foot on Saudi soil by alluding to the Saudi conviction that a Jew had been responsible for the murder of the Prophet Muhammad ...”

“... He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his latest novel: he did some ‘major’ TV interviews, a bit of radio, and – towards the end of his stint – he called a press conference in order to complain about the low quality of the reviews he had been getting. His tone was querulous. He felt that we (I myself was one of the ...”

“... been put down to an essentially personal hatred of Mrs Thatcher, but the blander unionism of Mr Major seems to be proving even more unmarketable. Beneath the ritual knockabout of party politics, a consensus has emerged which has slipped away from the commonalities of ‘Britishness’. Moreover, this reaction is considered rather than emotional. Anyone ...”

“... advocacy of slavery was undoubtedly intended as a provocation, but was not necessarily insincere. John Law of Lauriston made his own distinctive contribution to the debate, in Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705). Law’s panacea was a system of paper money, underwritten not by precious metals or the ...”

“... hymns and liturgical texts. One could scarcely imagine a better concise guide to the Scrolls than John Collins’s The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Collins, who teaches at Yale, writes with clarity and liveliness, and throughout his account exercises great judiciousness, a quality that has not always been prominent in discussions of this subject. For the ...”

“... alone on the Left in their ability to raise the obvious questions about how the world works. As John Lloyd puts it in his opening chapter: ‘The global movements’ – his term for the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation milieu – ‘have found new ways of exercising political power . . . They can generate widespread public sympathy and a degree of ...”

“... Epithets like ‘disenchanted’ come to mind. That is because I have been reading the latest of John Gage’s books, Colour in Art. Gage’s achievement, here and in Colour and Culture (1993) and its successor Colour and Meaning (1999), is to tinge colour with time like no writer before. His curious and scrupulous mind teases out countless nuances in our ...”

“... Sir Charles Worgan, a press baron, becomes the patron of a progressive theatre-manager, Holt St John. (Worgan also rather superbly patronises Oxford University, and receives an honorary doctorate for his efforts.) But Worgan soon falls out with St John, since he insists that art is an investment and that the theatre, like ...”

“... ecumenical initiatives of Dury and Comenius. Those themes, rich and richly documented, still lack major studies. Admittedly, princely support for the Calvinist international was often a matter of words or gestures, which cost rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after ...”