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“... popular text was the Secretum secretorum, supposedly Aristotle’s teachings as passed directly to Alexander the Great, translated from Arabic into Latin. Another canonical text after 1300 was De anima by pseudo-Avicenna, which argued that the three basic ingredients in alchemy were human blood, hair and birds’ eggs. Students of such works were zealous ...”

“... Middle Ages – Ivanhoe – and then deepened and developed through the early modern Tudor and Stuart periods. Here romantic medievalism was given full rein, in fictions rife with melodramatic contrasts and moralising stereotypes of the kind that rightly draw Jameson’s strictures. In European terms, this was probably the most influential side of ...”

“... treats it as something the biographer must get out of his way. It is as if Herbert Spencer or John Stuart Mill, not Mrs Gaskell, herself a novelist, had descended on Haworth parsonage to decipher the lives of the makers of Gondal. Holden is too new to the world of theatre talk to have got all his details right, let alone arrange them into the figure in ...”

“... we are enabled to test reasons’. This was a science which, Peirce was to argue, contra John Stuart Mill and others, must have nothing to do with psychology but be purely formal, with the task of classifying the products of thought, not of investigating the manner of thought’s production. As the study of validity in argument or inference, logic must be ...”

“... left behinde her and in a darke prison all alone … I that was wont to behold her ridinge like Alexander, huntinge like Diana, walkinge like Venus, the gentle winde blowinge her faire heare about her pure cheekes like a nimpth … All wounds have skares but that of fantasye, all affections their relentinge but that of woman kinde. ‘All wounds have ...”

“... claim our hearts’, as the blurb has it. But apart from some pages on Coleridge’s life of Sir Alexander Ball, his former boss in Malta, there is very little indeed on what the Friend was actually about. Biographia Literaria is the other text to receive extended treatment here, mainly as a story of the miraculous, willed recovery Coleridge made in writing ...”

“... today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...”

“... and a close friend of men and women of the intellectual calibre of Bentham, the young John Stuart Mill, Francis Jeffrey, until recently editor of the Edinburgh Review, the Grotes, the Romillys, the Carlyles. A more weighty anchor to conventionality was her ten-year-old daughter Lucy. All this was now put in jeopardy by these dangerous ...”

“... been a pre-O-level English class, he wheeled in a huge TV and video player and put on Fanny and Alexander. A class of twenty-odd 14-year-old boys making innuendo-laden gags about a ‘Swedish film’ was not the most promising of audiences for a slow-moving 188-minute masterpiece of European cinema. But we watched it for the first 45 minutes (an ...”

“... Robert Burton’s visions of religious madness as a satanic pandemic, a commonplace in Tudor and Stuart England, seemed increasingly incomprehensible to those ‘rational’ 18th-century Christians unconvinced of direct divine (let alone diabolic) intervention in the world. More than this: religious transports – lusting after salvation, dreading ...”

“... Froude’s Life of Carlyle and his edition of Carlyle’s Reminiscences, a hundred years since Alexander Carlyle’s New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude. Everyone has long since ...”

“... case he makes for Shakespeare’s skill at portraying women. He is also interestingly troubled by Alexander Pope, whose technique is so impressive but whose morality is non-existent. All of de Quincey’s criticism is answerable to the charge of being minor, and eccentric, but for the historian of criticism, his place in the reaction, via German ...”

“... gone, but the thistle detail on the fireplace is accompanied by the Latin motto of the vanquished Stuart dynasty, ‘Nemo me impune lacessit,’ translated as ‘No one attacks me with impunity,’ or ‘Wha daur meddle wi’ me?’ ‘I am a Jacobite myself,’ Victoria reportedly told the Windsor Castle librarian. The original tartan carpets have not ...”

“... to be the Habsburgs’ longest serving and most effective functionary in the Low Countries, Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. A more immediate success was that otherwise inexplicable papal readiness to grant the untried Society its generous Bull of Foundation in 1540. There was back-up. Leonor de Mascarenhas, a strong-minded, cultured and celibate ...”

“... English history as the domain of faction. He would have had to explore the consequences of the Stuart-Palatine marriage of 1613; he would have had to relate the history of Western Europe in the 17th century, a subject his friend William Robertson had not explored; and the history of the succession to the English and Scottish thrones would have involved him ...”