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“... never ‘write “I” any more,’ for ‘in art, don’t you see, there is no first person.’ Jonathan Dollimore sees in the conflict between Gide’s courageous ‘essentialist ethic’ and Wilde’s uncompromising ‘transgressive aesthetic’ a paradigm of the internal contradictions of homosexual theory and a preamble to ‘the modern history of ...”

“... pitiful subjection – promotes a neurotic and defeatist view of power in history and discourse. Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned, a monumental study of Renaissance anatomy, is a contribution to this debate. It is an impressive work which investigates the troubled status of the body in the English Renaissance. Sawday synthesises a wide range of ...”

“... of the covert bond which unites them, at least in retrospect, as key figures in British post-war comedy. Both were gay; both were in the closet; and both, therefore, were fully tapped into that vein of sexual subterfuge and masquerade which has always been central to the British sense of humour. Both idolised Sid Field, and learned some of the basic ...”

“... accessible to us, not so much because he is the more modern figure as because he is the more Post-Modern, adept at the art of self-invention and reinvention. He was a better political actor than most of his rivals in Parliament because, while they thought they were in a glorified gentleman’s club or a glorified philanthropic meeting, he realised that ...”

“... in the Southern states. Like others before him, Brown attributes Adams’s lack of sympathy with post-Civil War American politics to his good luck in spending the war in fashionable London society (his father was the United States representative) rather than in a Union Army camp. Brown also effectively exposes Adams’s outbursts against ‘Jew ...”

“... Some Western analysts have suggested that Tunis and Egypt will turn into North African versions of post-revolutionary Iran, if the Muslim Brotherhood and its Tunisian counterpart, Nahda, or the Renaissance Party, come to power. Chourfi and Ali admit they used to be admirers of Iran. Ali did his student dissertation on Marx, and when the Iranian Revolution ...”

“... has for a long time been the view of a neoliberal school of legal thought; but the argument of Jonathan Sumption’s 2019 Reith Lectures, delivered in May and June and now issued in book form, is more accommodating. It is that while law and due process have their place, they owe considerably more respect to the political process than the UK’s courts have ...”

“... Ammaniti internationally famous, his fourth, Io non ho paura (2001, translated into English by Jonathan Hunt as I’m Not Scared), is set in the long hot summer of 1978, in an isolated hamlet surrounded by cornfields in an unspecified part of southern Italy. The narrator, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano, is quick-witted, observant, brave and good ...”

“... work once he was back at Oxford and the war had just begun. The first part of Collingwood’s post-Autobiography project was published in 1940 as An Essay on Metaphysics. Metaphysics was out of fashion, and in some ways Collingwood thought it deserved its unpopularity. He accepted that the old Aristotelian dream of a ‘science of pure being’ was ...”

“... known in England.’ But he hadn’t confined himself to literature. In 1746 he accepted a post as secretary to Lieutenant General James St Clair, who was preparing to lead a force of several thousand in an assault on the French in Canada. He spent two or three months anticipating a ‘romantic adventure’ on the other side of the Atlantic, but owing ...”

“... the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed ...”

“... content was a matter of indifference; that their questions were: will it sell? Will it get me a post in the Peking bureaucracy? Will it earn me prestige in Pergamum? Some of the ancients some of the time were ingenuous seekers after truth: they did not run down the road to riches but struggled up the path of knowledge; and it is the features of that path ...”

“... match the Parthenon had he not been appointed minister of armaments. But when he was offered the post he had accepted with indecent alacrity. The Nuremberg Rally of 1936. This was the second job he owed to luck’s efficacy in removing obstacles. Before Hitler fell for Speer, the leading contenders for architect laureate of the Third Reich were Paul ...”

“... Hamid Karzai’s two administrations, most recently as interior minister; he was removed from his post in 2010 after a suicide bomber penetrated a high-level conference. Atmar, like Avetisyan, thought that Karzai’s grip on the situation was much weaker than Dr Najib’s had been. ‘He had a better equipped army than the current one and a sizeable air ...”

“... the troubles of Chechnya’s first spell of independence between 1991 and 1994. Those early post-Soviet years had seen a rise in criminality and mafia activity in every part of Russia and the former Soviet republics, as people grabbed what had previously been state property, sought to get their hands on the sources of wealth in a new free-for-all ...”