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“... good, honest building. The ending of The Seven Lamps of Architecture vibrates through the work of Philip Webb, as of those Arts and Crafts architects who were his disciples. Austerity and self-abnegation are its hallmarks. You cannot relish Webb’s buildings without a feeling for puritanism. His was a life shot through with refusals: he would not ...”

“... of mental reservation, which was most fully developed in this period by the Spanish author Martin de Azpilcueta, otherwise known as Dr Navarrus, whose casuistical Handbook for Confessors and Penitents first appeared in 1549 and had gone through 81 editions by 1625. In his commentary on a chapter in Gratian’s Decretum, Navarrus clearly assumed that ...”

“... Orthodox get-up – black hat and gabardine. In ‘Eli, the Fanatic’, the transformation helps Philip Roth connect up some of the leading themes of his short stories: anxiety, desire, separation, the odd, unsettling consequences of changes that are incomplete. There are risks for the writer who imagines what a devout world is like. Nathan Englander has the ...”

“... a rotter in what could have been the first novel I ever read: Grim and Gay by, conceivably, Sir Philip Gibbs. This rotter was adored by an acquiescent master (there are several such masters in this memoir), who praised him as ‘a boy of character’. ‘Yes,’ said someone else, darkly: ‘bad character.’ Simon paints himself here as a boy whose ...”

“... marks as we received from you, standing and weeping. You cannot be angry at us for writing.’ Martin Bloomer offers this story as an example of the violence that was the Roman teacher’s prerogative to dispense – and which Roman schoolboys were trained to dole out in their turn. Bloomer’s Rome is an oppressive place, preoccupied with masculinity and ...”

“... centuries of legally enshrined, lethally enforced white supremacy to an end. Its national hero is Martin Luther King Jr. Far from giving way in the face of moral example and legal right, racial injustice rose to fever pitch during the 1960s. The third and deadliest Ku Klux Klan (succeeding the Southern Klan of the late 1860s and the national Klan of the ...”

“... Angleton became convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, had been poisoned by the Russians so that Wilson could take over the ...”

“... comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to the relief of her father’s tenants. In so doing, she ruined her family and was gratefully termed ‘The Princess of Connemara’ by her people. Thereafter penniless and landless, she emigrated to Belgium where she supported herself ...”

“... novel The Wings of the Dove could be the same kind of catalyst for a disturbed individual as Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver was for John W. Hinckley III. The incongruity that so morally intricate and oblique a work as James’s should be exploited only for a cruelly manipulative piece of chicanery counts dramatically, moreover: the sensitive ...”

“... to the final four at the Euros that summer too. A few months before, the FA’s chief executive, Martin Glenn, made a public apology for the harm the FA had done women by keeping them out of the game. From 1921 to 1971, it had banned women from playing on its grounds, deliberately stifling a sport that had thrived in the first decades of the 20th century.One ...”

“... painter to the electors of Saxony. He was close to members of the faculty of the university – Philip Melanchthon was one. Cupid Complaining to Venus relates to a Greek verse Melanchthon used as the basis for Latin moralities. Contemporaries would have registered that the roebuck, which laps water in the foreground of Adam and Eve, was famously faithful ...”

“... to put you in the presence of a person, not a picture. It was probably Gainsborough’s friend Philip Thicknesse who wrote that his ‘pictures may not be said so properly to be like the originals as to be the people themselves’, and similar remarks were made about La Tour’s pastels. The critical language would be equally appropriate for a piece of ...”

“... He will tell us nothing of real interest about his wives, mistresses or kids (although he chucks Martin the odd walk-on here and there), or about any living loved-ones – a species defined by him as those who have emotional claims on me’. He doesn’t want to hurt types like these, he says, or hurt them any more than he already has (mind your own ...”

“... to resist the daily injustices and indignities of the Jim Crow South. Today, with the birthday of Martin Luther King a national holiday and Alabama cities like Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery competing to attract tourists by highlighting their role in the struggle for racial justice, Rosa Parks has become a national icon second only to King ...”

“... form the enchanted or bewitched triad or triangle which still exerts power and fascination. Dr Martin Luther King is the slain hero and absent knight who – though they don’t teach you this in school – fell victim to the swords of all three.Now this is a fairly routine passage from Seymour Hersh’s new book, ill-advisedly (and unironically) entitled ...”