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“... property rights by giving power to hereditary elites who held local office. Although he didn’t read Locke or Montesquieu, like them he aimed to shore up the position of what we might call the gentry. Others, like the great modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang’s lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary’s argument ...”

“... the inquiry looked at 720 locations where polonium traces were found, heard from 62 witnesses and read through 5000 pages of evidence. Appendix 12 – not included in the published report – contained the evidence given behind closed doors under the Official Secrets Act. It presumably included evidence from Litvinenko’s handler at MI6, whom he used to meet ...”

“... reproduction of the Elizabethan attitudes their characters articulate.I admit that when I first read Romeo and Juliet I found Romeo’s image pleasingly glamorous rather than potentially offensive: the bejewelled Ethiope, whether male or female, seemed to be offering an alternative style of beauty with which Juliet’s, and the night’s, might excitingly ...”

“... profound!’ and ‘what nonsense!’ we think at one and the same time, just as we do when we read Blake’s own annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses or Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels. What you shouldn’t do is begin your biography with a paragraph like this: William Blake, poet and artist, is one of the most important and controversial ...”

“... is that the strategy would tell us nothing about how Hogarth’s pictures were intended to be read, only about how they might perhaps have been read. For Paulson, however, it is a strategy that offers immediate access to a subtext whose meanings are fully intended by the artist. ‘The popular or ...”

“... in keeping with the man he has become 30 years later when he writes this memoir. Hanna likes being read to, and Michael reads her his school set books: Homer, Lessing, Schiller; and after that, War and Peace. ‘Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards – that became the ritual in our ...”

“... encountered Orwell in 1977, when a brave English teacher got a group of bolshy 14-year-olds to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and told us to write our own dystopia. One wag (I still regret it wasn’t me) put up his hand and said: ‘Sir, if Orwell just scrambled the digits in 1948 to get 1984, can I call my dystopia “1977”?’ Most people of my generation ...”

“... among them) to the political and cultural circumstances of 1621,1 since nowadays these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed ...”

“... are successful abroad is that they shall give a leg up to their fellow-countrymen. A few do so; Peter Porter has been most generous, and Clive James has come to the task more recently, but also with generosity. In this vivacious and often sumptuous new collection of his essays, he has a great deal to say in praise of fellow expatriates, and some magnanimous ...”

“... far more static, even regressive, for reasons among which human nature must rank high, or what Peter Clarke in a scrutiny in this volume of the British ‘social-democratic’ tradition calls the ‘deadweight of social conservatism, in all classes’. Part One of the collection, though entitled ‘The Working Class in British Politics’, shows it in ...”

“... is the relationship of the frames to architectural motifs and to other types of furniture. Peter Thornton’s The Italian Renaissance Interior is a long, erudite and entertaining investigation of such matters as how rooms were lit and heated, how ceilings were constructed and decorated, where carpets came from and how they were displayed. It is chiefly ...”

“... Camp sensibility. It would be 1964 before Susan Sontag emerged with her ‘Notes on Camp’, which read nowadays, in their arch solemnity, like some kind of ambush on the tendency itself, and which must be among the least effectively stylised pronouncements on the virtues of American stylisation. However, I’d sooner, by a thousand times, have Sontag’s ...”

“... to sleep each night. Over the next three decades he became the survivor who wrote the most but was read the least, producing more than thirty books of history (The Administered Man, a study of the deportations of German Jewry), sociology (The Experience of Powerlessness, a study of camp organisation), poetry and fiction, all published on a shoestring in West ...”

“... there was only one child, a girl. This was a mistake: she was supposed to have been a boy called Peter, and although she was baptised Gerda Erika Maria, her father never called her anything but Peter. Appearances mattered to the young Rösels. My mother has told me that my grandmother went hungry so that she could afford ...”

“... Mr Justice Cantley, whose outrageously biased speech (in favour of the defence) was satirised by Peter Cook in the character of Justice Cocklecarrot. In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve ...”