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“... reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts things out sensibly, by compulsion if ...”

“... murals to the Tate was an attempt to realise that ambition; to the same end, in 1964, he accepted John and Dominique de Menil’s commission to be the sole artist represented on the walls of a college chapel in Houston. The de Menils had already entrusted the design of the chapel to Johnson as part of his master plan for the University of St Thomas. The ...”

“... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...”

“... tragedy. Denied the dignity of his tragic heroism, the noble Hamlet is a destructive force. In John Updike’s recent novel Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet is still more unlovable. He is coldly manipulative, while his kingly father is reduced to a clumsy and egotistical bully. Updike is also engaged in an act of rehabilitation. But he turns his attention to ...”

“... rejecting the idea of sin and proclaiming the innocence of a life freed from the yoke of ‘Christian stupidity’. He was thrown in prison, managed to escape, but a second arrest sealed his fate: in December 1512 he was burned at the stake in The Hague, along with his writings. Not long afterwards the Anabaptists emerged, with their ideas of ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... It was a bonus that these latter prisoners were exposed to the regular attentions of nearby Christian mission stations, while learning – so the administrators reasoned – the necessary discipline of productive work. Of course, the most celebrated British example of enforced colonial labour and imagined redemption involved the territories that ...”

“... to get away from her mother – they share a room – and spies an escape route in Master John Edes, a mild-mannered shipping clerk who has been teaching her to read the gospel. But Edes is an associate of a sinister newcomer called Matthew Hopkins, who is on a mission to root out witchcraft. In wartime Manningtree, Puritan fervour is running ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... During the Middle Ages both she and her work were largely forgotten. (According to one legend, the Christian patriarch Gregory of Nazianzos, offended by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance ...”

“... to perishing.’Soon after the founding of the Eglise Métropolitaine, Satie and Latour wrote a ‘Christian ballet’ about the conversion of the pagan Uspud, an extraordinarily odd piece of theatre. A Mammal’s Notebook reprints the stage directions. It opens with Uspud playing knuckle-bones in the desert beside a semi-circle of statues. There are skeletons ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... di People’s Election Special rolling off a thirty-year-old Heidelberg printing machine at the John Love Press, a small works where the centre-spread of an eight-page edition was already flouncing onto the delivery table. (This little engine-room of populist exasperation was another non-Kaplan place.) Paul Kamara, one of the paper’s editors, drove down a ...”

“... He continues: ‘The same idea of putting oneself in the position of another is involved in the Christian commandment that we love our neighbour as ourself.’ That, however, is a Christian commandment that really is a direct quotation from the Pentateuch (Leviticus XIX, 18). His brief, bumpy ride through the history of ...”