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“... was Ayr, ‘wham ne’er a town surpasses’, is authentically and variously present there. His powers of expression are at a high point of development, and are used in a wider variety of ways than they are elsewhere. Yet the epistles have usually been neglected in favour of other aspects of his work, and of conceptions of it which are more or less ...”

“... prised them, it sets out to judge the degree to which the drama was or was not complicit with the powers of the state that seem to sustain it. Second, by inserting the ‘afterlives’ of the plays into subsequent history and by historicising salient features of ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’, it offers to assess their use as instruments of present ...”

“... Another says that we see in Mabuse ‘the ultimately unbearable face of the anarchistic powers of capital’. The Nazis were legally in power, and Goebbels didn’t want people to see a film about toppling governments, or toppling the very idea of government.I need to explain why I (and others) think the film is anti-authoritarian, or authoritarian ...”

“... regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous disease.’ Thomas Carlyle, whose own nerves had their deplorable moments, knew a fraught hidden drama when he saw one: ‘How has this man contrived, with such a nervous system, to keep alive for near sixty years?’ Given this insight, it was mischievous of Carlyle to go ...”

“... he was soon to be made Electoral Saxon and Polish Court compositeur while still employed at St Thomas’s School in Leipzig – Bach is described by Wolff as attempting to recapitulate the main outlines of his life in a genealogical sketch and family tree. In so doing he was opening a broad historical spectrum that induced him to look in two ...”

“... Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s relic, a fragment blessed with mystic powers, miraculously rising from the sacred site of the archive. The complex nature of this archive was well captured in 1945 by Millicent Todd Bingham in her introduction to Bolts of Melody, a selection of more than six hundred poems culled from the vast trove ...”

“... speak of all His goodness.’ It’s true that the result can sometimes veer towards Fotherington-Thomas – ‘he sa Hullo clouds hullo sky he is a girlie,’ as Nigel Molesworth reported in Down with Skool. But in parts they retain a curious charm (‘We cannot see God, for He is invisible; but we can see His works, and worship His footsteps in the green ...”

“... confrontations between one European citizenry and another) and beef up the European Commission’s powers to control the budgets of EU member states. The idea that ‘market forces’ would bring about convergence within the Eurozone has effectively been abandoned. In its place is a strange mixture of French and German ideas about how Europe – and states in ...”

“... of American politics than the parallel charge of individual hypocrisy routinely levelled against Thomas Jefferson and other champions of liberty, who happened to own slaves. Institutional hypocrisy can coincide with personal hypocrisy, but it doesn’t have to. It is also consistent with deep personal sincerity, and such sincerity will often be one of its ...”

“... tea-cup opensA lane to the land of the dead.These vistas owe something to Auden’s first love, Thomas Hardy, and especially to what he described as Hardy’s way of ‘looking at life from a very great height’, his willingness ‘to see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history, life on ...”

“... like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the finished version settles on ‘a ...”

“... Atotoxtli’s way of raising one eyebrow and lowering the other really ‘have given her ruling powers anywhere’? It seems unlikely that communication in a vanished hierarchical society could map so smoothly onto the conventions of soap opera, for example when an underlying meaning needs to be signalled (‘He arched his eyebrows when he said ...”

“... impossibility comes their case for reading James, who can play Nurse, reminding us of the curative powers of exercising free will. But, as Alice wants us to ask, would it always be ‘best’ to get up? Her life and writings complicate a neat picture of health as merely a matter of flexing sufficient will to be well.Neither​ Sutton nor Kaag/van Belle bring ...”

“... to plunder Ireland, under the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same syndicate moved into control of the ...”

“... Chislett(Company)Victoria Glendinning(Listener)Ian Hamilton(Sunday Times)Tim Heald(Now)Thomas Hinde(Sunday Telegraph)Bernard Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher ...”