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“... political discourse. The writers who have dominated British political thinking are Locke, Hume, Burke and Mill. What distinguishes their arguments and conclusions is that they are easily understood, popularised and accepted. Unlike the political intelligentsia of continental Europe, they do not speak a language that is incomprehensible to the averagely ...”

“... to the electorate as well as to Conference’. To Benn this was simply ‘the Edmund Burke belief, absolutely nothing whatever to do with democracy within the Labour Party’. In retrospect, Benn had a glimmering of the flaw in his great democratic campaign. ‘It came to me,’ he wrote in 1987, ‘that the trouble with the 1981 deputy ...”

“... of this journal cannot be unaware, there appeared last year a controversial volume edited by Peter Widdowson called Re-Reading English, which faithfully applied Williams’s critique of academic English, and equally faithfully reproduced many of the shortcomings of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... for their votes on planning and rezoning issues. Among the worst offenders was the overbearing Ray Burke, a former minister, who was eventually jailed for tax evasion, but had earlier pocketed almost £3 million when he sold his family home to the property developers Flynn and O’Flaherty. The lavish lifestyle of Charles Haughey, the former Fianna Fáil ...”

“... language of Britain’s ancien régime was wrapped in subterfuge, artifice and mystery. They saw Burke’s writing, for instance, as an elaborate theatrical spectacle, appealing to the emotions instead of reason. At the centre of John Barrell’s exhaustive study of treason in the mid-1790s is a brilliantly sustained argument about the struggle to fix the ...”

“... common servant, but her unusual beauty and even more unusual luck brought her to the attention of Peter the Great, who made her first his mistress, then his wife, and finally his successor. She became Tsarina Catherine I, and from 1725 to 1727 she reigned as absolute monarch over an empire that already stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific. ...”

“... and bundlesThe book was published in 1934 by the Objectivist Press with an introduction by Kenneth Burke, and has been scandalously out of print since. (The copy I own came from the library of William Carlos Williams; when I bought it, the pages were uncut.) Sometime in the 1950s, he returned to Testimony, this time confining himself to legal cases of ...”

“... kinds continues at an unflagging pace, often getting by without puns and politics. For example, Peter Thomson’s Shakespeare’s Professional Career is an exceptionally lively and up-to-the-minute introduction to ‘Shakespeare’s job’. It leans slightly towards the view that his family, and he himself residually, was Catholic, and argues with more ...”

“... level a projection of modern scholarship. Kurke borrows the phrase ‘an elusive quarry’ from Peter Burke’s classic Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; but the practical difficulties are much more acute for the ancient world, which has not preserved the wealth of play scripts, sermons, ballads and chapbooks on which ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... argument – the most persuasive conservative arguments are still those current since the days of Burke and Adam Smith – but because of what has happened in the world since the Second World War. The various changes which have undermined the presuppositions of traditional socialism are by now familiar enough. But their cumulative effect has taken time to ...”

“... Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through ...”

“... implicitly (and sometimes, in my experience, explicitly) favour submission to Providence. Edmund Burke and Brexitists ought not to agree on much, but Brexitists do seem to share Burke’s belief that ‘the awful Author of our Being is the Author of our place in the order of existence … Having disposed and marshalled us ...”

“... in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of ...”