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“... has eluded them, and its subject is one of the four or five people who stick in my gullet. John Traill Christie was my headmaster for just over four years. I never knew him well, though I have had to think about him a lot. For a brief period I must have occupied his thoughts because he spent about a term and a half, which coincided with some of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to reveal a masquer, richly clad in the costume of a ‘wodewose’, or wild man. Early modern playhouses like the Globe could manage nothing on this scale; yet the anonymous Sir Clyomon and Sir ...”

“... I am on the right track, but it is clearly possible that the extremely expert Debbie read the two-foot thick manuscript of her husband’s book and decided that it was so boring it wouldn’t sell. And in this context, you have to appreciate that ‘unsaleability’ has nothing to do with sales in Waterstone’s or W. H. Smith’s: the real money is made for ...”

“... movements in Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia? Why is Kelly, who appears never to have set foot there, so confident that the rural population of South Yemen is sunk in religious fanaticism? If they were as aimlessly pious as Kelly implies, one can only wonder why so many tens of thousands of rural Yemenis have left their villages to find jobs all over ...”

“... placed in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is commemorated beside John Milton. There is occasion to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do ...”

“... humanist Enlightenment: through Paley, Priestley, Price, Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin. But stick your foot, or your library ticket, into the sea of pamphlets and sermons of Dissent and of Methodist break-aways, and you are back in a tradition descending from 17th-century Anabaptists and Ranters, of Ezra and Isaiah, of ...”

“... local surgeon. At 21 he moved to London to continue his medical studies as anatomical assistant to John Hunter at St George’s Hospital. Although Jenner returned to his Berkeley medical practice in 1773, Hunter had recognised Jenner’s scientific prowess and encouraged him in his research. ‘Why think – why not try the experiment,’ he wrote in ...”

“... had forgotten the leash but it didn’t matter. We weren’t going to catch anything. She was five foot nine, and thin, and often ill, and easily tired. But none of that mattered either. It was all in the timing. Normally you’d be in the river wading, but to start with, the bank is fine. She paid out her line into the water, letting the current take the fly ...”

“... tracing a line from Rimbaud through Futurism to Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, Frank O’Hara, John Cage and beyond – who have advanced what she sees as modernist goals: above all, the up-to-date, sceptical investigation of the materials and ideas from which a work of art gets made. Though much of Perloff’s writing concerns the great dead, she became ...”

“... I said. I had only begun to suspect something when he began multiplying explanations. My foot shot out – this happens, when I see the truth suddenly – and hit the modesty panel with a dull thud. It was all a novelty to me. I knew men had dealings with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down ...”

“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... or Liberals,’ the historian Lecky pronounced in 1892. And not long afterwards, Isaac Foot, the father of Michael and a firm Cromwellian, used to ‘judge a man by one thing: “Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?”’ Worden has no time for Postmodernism, the view that ‘the past exists only in the ...”

“... afraid of things that may possibly happen in this country to them,’ the Los Angeles Archbishop John Cantwell observed in a letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati in July 1933. The Hollywood Question was now a political matter. Anti-semitic stereotypes were employed by both supporters and opponents of Upton Sinclair’s campaign for Governor of ...”

“... a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one of the least ...”