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“... Mann seems to believe, stems from a fatal self-misunderstanding. He has in mind the boast of Charles Krauthammer and other neo-con ideologues that the US today is the most powerful polity in history. With bases in 132 countries, America has ‘the first military force deployable over the entire world’. Moreover, since 1991, it has had no ...”

“... window also opened to the garden in the autumn mornings, Ruskin does not say; but either way this passage anticipates – or perhaps actively influenced – a review which appeared in the Academy in 1906 of a performance in London, at the Aeolian Hall, by a group called the Folksong Quartet, ‘whose special business it is,’ the reviewer writes, ‘to sing ...”

“... A glimpse of what it may have meant to move even within Florence can perhaps be had from a passage in a text set down some years after The Freudian Slip. ‘Anyone with any knowledge of neurosis, which need not be that of a psychiatrist but may be that of a “victim”, knows that agoraphobia can be “overcome” in a number of ways. One may succeed ...”

“... Waters and Jacques Derrida. Some of de Man’s judgments are routine – he thought very highly of Charles Morgan, for instance, as the French did in those days. He speaks well of Valéry, and that does remind us of the links between his later thought and his early interest in Symbolism. But his views on history, if he remembered them later, must have seemed ...”

“... ritardando, but in the extant films of their performances, Mravinsky’s physical gestures in this passage are never the same.The quality of a conductor’s abilities is only discernible by inference from the music. Films of conducting with the sound turned off are quite weird (try it with Bernstein or Rattle conducting the end of Mahler’s Second ...”

“... queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room ...”

“... of Austria. That is, he was named after, or had usurped and was allowed the name of, the son of Charles V and victor of the battle of Lepanto – the short-lived, but symbolically important, sea victory of Spain over Islam two generations earlier. He was a fool called Don Juan of Austria. ‘The Jester Named Don Juan of Austria’ (1633) What did it ...”

“... ships and transported to the American colonies, where they – or those who survived the Middle Passage – were sold at auction, stripped naked for the perusal of prospective buyers. With the defeat of the South in the Civil War – by 1804, all the northern states had abolished slavery – four million slaves won their freedom. Under the protection of ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... the 1801 Act of Union – ‘not Protestant landlords. Again, few Irish Members opposed the passage of the Gregory clause in Westminster. There is ample scope for further research here by cultural, social and local historians.’Ample indeed. In the early Forties Eamon de Valera, who had been brought up in Co. Clare, a part of Ireland deeply affected by ...”

“... of Spirit; but ‘in order to become genuine knowledge … it must travel a long way and work its passage.’ You won’t learn much if you approach learning as an easy and straightforward matter, ‘shot from a pistol’ as Hegel put it. Learning is agonistic, deathly struggle. Learning is also life itself.The young Rose chose to do her DPhil on Theodor ...”

“... commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was being moved from prison to prison, Harcourt had refused to countenance the idea that he and the others were political ...”

“... so darkly as to make it unsurprising that Mack twice calls it ‘teasing’. The poet’s friend Charles Jervas painted it, probably in 1717, when Pope – aged 29 – was deep in his translation of Homer, a lengthy task that not only sealed his fame as the country’s leading poet (he was admired by good judges when still under twenty) but secured him the ...”

“... to Bernard Stora, his assistant on Le Cercle rouge, the point of ‘stretching’ a short passage of dialogue, or a scene, was to heighten its power, and slow down time. Melville’s acts of ‘dilation’ sometimes seem superfluous, even perverse, only to acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red ...”

“... semantics were not by nature radically discontinuous.‘The essential condition of music,’ Charles Rosen wrote at the conclusion of an illuminating analysis of a pair of Schubert songs in The Frontiers of Meaning (1994), ‘is its proximity to nonsense.’ A less mischievous way to make the same point would be to say that the meaning of music is, in ...”