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“... The methods of the medieval masons were complicated and ‘would have been difficult to explain to lay people, even supposing that the masons had wanted to – which they didn’t’. New features could be introduced without any sense of anachronism, rather as a new picture may be hung in an old house. ‘Britain’ itself was still a semi-mythic ...”

“... not that many – and the high rate of acquittal, which in England, where evidence was weighed by lay juries, stood at around 75 per cent. There was no smooth narrative arc from credulity to disbelief, any more than there has been from faith to atheism.Though the Middle Ages were alive with heterodox and heretical opinions, religious strife was the product of ...”

“... seem, in such a sentence, already to hear the elegantly despairing voices of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Some of Barthes’s other generalities are rather glib too (‘a modern masterpiece is impossible,’ ‘order ... is always a murder in intention’), and his eager, stabs at historians’ history (‘Now the 1850s bring the concurrence of three new ...”

“... nobody had told royalty it was a divine creative spirit for three hundred years, and the whole lay-out of this ad-hoc theatre, with the Queen in a high glass cage before them, addressed personally, and any other audience only let creep in along the sides, made it the strangest performance they were ever going to take part in. The mad king of Bavaria could ...”

“... doesn’t have much choice, but for different reasons. One of his texts is ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, where Freud defends the use of ‘mere pronouns’ rather than ‘sonorous Greek nouns’. ‘In psychoanalysis we love to stay in touch with popular modes of thinking,’ Freud says rather archly. But in English the pronouns sound stranger than ...”

“... unable during the 1960s to reconcile the genuine tensions between voluntarism and regulation that lay at the heart of British trade unionism, this turned out in the end to be as much a tragedy for the wider political economy as for either the TUC or himself. These are instances in a long history, in which the unions again and again spurned the ...”

“... for security reasons, but hardly enough to send her to the chair. It is worth checking out what lay behind some of the other names that appear in Hoberman’s mind-boggling index. Let’s take a look for instance at Utyosov, Leonid, page 156. Utyosov is mentioned because Grigory Alexandrov’s film Jolly Fellows, 1934 (better known in translation as The ...”

“... the talk after the viewing trying to find out why, along with The Seventh Seal, Le Mépris, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, it was considered a marvel, and why Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, charming though it was, failed because it was self-indulgent. Self-indulgence was very often the reason for a film or play to fail in the eyes of Doris and her ...”

“... taxation work? Or maybe class war? But without the Communist Party – of which Todd, grandson of Paul Nizan, was briefly a member in the 1960s – it’s not clear who would lead a struggle of this kind. Unless of course … And here it comes as no surprise to discover that the big incubations of the Front National, under Marine Le Pen’s father, took place ...”

“... court record. Benedict XVI recently advised that ‘hers is a beautiful example of holiness for lay people involved in politics, especially in difficult situations. Faith is the light that guided all her choices.’ He wouldn’t warm to all the company who gather round her standard: just as socialists, feminists and liberal Catholics rallied to her as the ...”

“... suggests that the true value of the option (and therefore of the taxpayer subsidy) for 2010 lay between £30 billion and £120 billion. There’s nothing specific to the UK about the subsidy, other than its size relative to the UK economy, which results from the fact that our banks are very large; two of the biggest, Lloyds and the Royal Bank of ...”

“... choose clear-cut positions intellectually or politically because the dilemma of irresolution lay within his own personality.’ Resolution was to be achieved only by writing and more writing; the regular thudding of his typewriter keys was the rhythm to which Williams marched. Along the way, Smith’s narrative throws some incidental light on the ...”

“... was family legend that his great-grandmother Nettie had Ojibwe blood, and over time Purdy came to lay more stress on that suppositious heritage. His antisemitism, though, more than kept pace with this sense of pride in First Nation ancestry. Gordon Lish, an admirer whose principles as an editor were influenced by the example of Purdy’s style, grew tired of ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... It was in this very lack of developed ideas that, when it reached the West, its limitation lay. ‘Sadly,’ Ghervas writes, ‘the spirit of enlarged Europe was never able to revive the postwar European spirit.’ Nor did it reach the western Balkans. There its opposite prevailed, the Spirit of Lyssa, goddess of anger, as Yugoslavia broke up and its ...”