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“... most likely to sympathise with the new arrivals, whether Chartists like Ernest Jones or George Jacob Harney, ‘advanced’ publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on the barricades or their daring ...”

“... could count major cultural figures among his friends – Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte and James Fenimore Cooper, for instance. Others he kept at a slight distance. Having done time with the notorious bore Hawthorne, he had the wit to remark: ‘Last night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said ...”

“... child, regained it to some extent by harassing the Spaniards, and was ruined by the accession of James I, who kept him in the Tower under a suspended death-sentence for 13 years on a trumped-up charge; but some may not know that the alleged offence was treasonable complicity with Spain. When the 13 years had passed, one of Ralegh’s many appeals to ...”

“... of election to the House of Representatives on the Whig ticket, the timing was dreadful. President James K. Polk, a Democrat, had just declared war on Mexico. Along with many other Whigs, Lincoln denounced Polk, incurring the charge of disloyalty to the troops. Then the Whig Party confirmed its meretriciousness by nominating Zachary Taylor, a returning ...”

“... and the early structuralist critics showed a decided preference for trivial books like the James Bond novels. Genette was nevertheless strongly affected by the revival of Russian Formalism and by Jakobson in particular; he is as interested as Todorov (and some modern American critics) in the relations between new forms of discourse analysis and old ...”

“... fantasies at work. Soon he gave up writing about the poor; and without altogether abandoning what Jacob Korg calls ‘the iconography of degradation’, he had occasional fits of relative jollity, as in the successful and lively novel of 1889, The Town Traveller. Less Dickensian than Wellsian, this novel is brightened by that rare person in Gissing, a ...”

“... would not have been so shy. Another harrowing story concerns a 19th-century American doctor, James Marion Sims, who was dubbed the ‘Architect of the Vagina’. Because only the poorest women gave birth in hospitals before the 20th century, physicians found in the wards a ready supply of powerless subjects for experimentation. Sims used black slaves and ...”

“... of the Pharisees from Jewish sources. These were, notably, Travers Herford, George Foot Moore and James Parkes. The latest in this line of pro-Phaisee Christian scholars is E.P. Sanders, whose brilliant book Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) contained an indictment of the one sidedness and partisanship of the school of anti-Pharisee scholarship and a ...”

“... of the standing critical wisdom. Many of his former antagonists have now moved to what William James thought of as the third phase in the assimilation of a threatening new idea. First they said it was absurd, then that it was peripheral, now they want to claim it as their own creation. So Bloom has in a sense won his battle. In doing so, he may have ...”

“... both academic and popular, most prominently in the Pulitzer-prize winning synthesis of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) – whose title alone suggested that we were back on familiar terrain – and in the sepia-tinted sentimentality of Ken Burns’s documentary. In McPherson’s influential work, a fixation on racial rather than ...”

“... English judges have added little to jurisprudential debates.’ In 1954 Mr Justice Lloyd-Jacob wrote to the Times about the importance of confining atomic energy to peaceful uses. Lord Hail-sham, then in practice as a QC, wrote angrily to Lord Chancellor Simonds, who in turn wrote to the judge: ‘In my opinion it was a breach of your duty as a judge ...”

“... a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed ...”

“... the first to isolate the secreted substance. The leaders were an academic pharmacologist – John Jacob Abel at Johns Hopkins University – and an industrial chemist called Jokichi Takamine who was working in New York for the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. Takamine won by being the first to identify – and name – adrenaline, but confusingly ...”

“... wanted to be buried in the Trinity Church cemetery, in their neighbourhood in New York, where John James Audubon and John Jacob Astor were also buried: The plots were all taken, but the cemetery offered a vault in its ten-storey mausoleum . . . Pallbearers carried the coffin outside to a wall of burial vaults . . . a ...”

“... your grace to tell me why is it that Spaniards, when they’re about to go into battle, invoke St James the Moor-Slayer and say: “St James, and close Spain!” By some chance is Spain open so that it’s necessary to close her, or what ceremony is that?’In describing​ pre-Islamic Arabia, the period of Jahiliya (the ...”