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“... neglect. Syrians who for years avoided the dilapidated bazaars are revisiting the charm of mud and wood, stone and marble, running fountains and cobbled paths too narrow for cars. A few landlords are turning their empty palaces into hotels, restaurants and bars where the young stay late into the night in jasmine-scented courtyards to savour water pipes as ...”

“... the dead feline, and it’s there, the nutty smell of gun oil from weapons heated in the sun, the wood smoke smell from Belli’s clothing, and mixed with all these ranker odours, the sweet, rather mysterious scents that were ever about the high forest.’ The beaters slung the leopard from a pole and carried it back to the plantation bungalows, singing a ...”

“... he said! ‘W.B. Yeats.’ And added: ‘I’m a poet.’ If he had said his name was Michael and declared himself to be an archangel it could not have had a more catastrophic effect upon me. ‘What?’ I exclaimed, ‘Yeats! The Irish poet! My God – well, my God … well … Yeats … well …’ Then I suddenly heard the ghastly sound of my ...”

“... upon the fire, and a very small quantity of the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His ...”

“... Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my ...”

“... burden. The cofferdams are required to detour around recovered stakes of ancient blackened wood, Anglo-Saxon fish traps. Experienced divers submerge in lightless filth. Triple-glazed windows and complimentary holidays don’t help the Thamesbank witnesses. The collateral damage of excavation has forced them to yield their privileged views and move ...”

“... power? Runciman is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...”

“... as civil unification offers can our inclinations achieve their best effects; as trees in a wood which seek to deprive each other of air and sunlight are forced to strive upwards and so achieve a beautiful straight growth; while those that spread their branches at will in isolated freedom grow stunted, tilted and crooked.’ The imagery of the bent and ...”

“... utterly surpassed by events even before 24 March, and indeed for Milosevic, it’s as if Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane. The KLA have taken over a handful of administrative buildings and appointed ministers under the auspices of an interim government. Their figurehead and Prime Minister is Hashim Thaci, a young man from the Drenica region with a family ...”

“... zone of large mid-Victorian properties divided into flats. I noticed a Methodist church with a wood-faced turret and a selection of hostels for backpacking passerines. But despite such awkward neighbours, and a degree of spillage from Finsbury Park kerb-crawlers, and the all too evident desperation of bruised addict-prostitutes, Wilberforce Road throbs ...”

“... line to Putin … he would not be making a regular spectacle of himself,’ the military analyst Michael Kofman, recently returned from Bakhmut, said in a podcast. ‘The reason he’s doing it is because he’s very desperate and he’s trying to get Putin’s attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on ...”

“... tender. ‘God bless you, my dear son. I pray for you constantly,’ he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did ...”

“... books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney – on the train to Edinburgh, the city where the nerve-wracked composer, on his way to insanity and death, was hospitalised after being gassed in 1917. I stared at the few surviving pictures of ...”

“... and Bellamy Foster in the US, as well as for European figures like Elmar Altvater in Germany and Michael Löwy and the late André Gorz in France, when he admitted that his work dwelt on ‘the reconstruction of Marx’s approach rather than its application’. Ecomarxism spent its first decades in methodological throat-clearing, outlining but not yet ...”

“... road. The Hermitage in Rathfarnham, where he moved the school in 1910, was set in fifty acres of wood and parkland, with a river and a lake near its boundary. For Pearse, the place had a different tutelary spirit: not Cúchulainn, but the ghost of Robert Emmet, who had led an ill-fated rebellion in Dublin in 1803 and was publicly executed in the city ...”