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“... of the godly cause – Sir Walter Mildmay, founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the MP Peter Wentworth, who agitated for further reform of the English church and its liturgy – may deserve further attention. He once declared that ‘I would have all reformations done by public authority. It were very dangerous that every private man’s zeal ...”

“... it under his own control. In the end he went a step too far, nominating for a peerage Sir Joseph Robinson, a South African randlord who had been convicted of fraud and fined a staggering £500,000. Meanwhile, Lloyd George dreamed of setting up a party of the centre which would form a permanent part of every future government, guaranteeing him office more or ...”

“... first from Oxford had no need to feel intellectually inferior, certainly not to Robert Robinson and the ‘dread’ Malcolm Bradbury, who seem to have been especially condescending. The petty humiliations of fame, however, gave her a new comic theme for the letters. There was the impertinence of photographers, who made her sit on a coil of wet rope ...”

“... Jardine who masterminded the notorious ‘bodyline’ tactics of Larwood and Voce; as captain, Peter May too was criticised for short-pitched bowling, time-wasting and nullifying the immortal Sonny Ramadhin’s fiendish spin by simply kicking the ball away down the leg side.It was axiomatic that only the upper-class amateur possessed the leadership ...”

“... the founders of the school to which he belongs.’ In one of his earliest pieces Stephen held up Robinson Crusoe as a fictional model, in which ‘all the incidents described are to the last degree simple, natural and regular.’Several other novelists were put in the dock as minor accomplices of Dickens, including Charlotte Brontë and her biographer, Mrs ...”

“... and no reckoning with their own deep violence was ever likely to occur. Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina was due to speak that first day, a black man deeply committed to the happy fiction that Donald Trump and his followers are not at all racist. But Robinson goes the extra mile. He’s a prince of ...”

“... dichotomy is apparent much earlier than the late 18th-century context in which McKeon locates it. Robinson Crusoe, who seems the most inevitable of heroes, is really an unusual phenomenon – the virtuous man who gets his reward on earth. On McKeon’s map he appears less the familiar exemplar of human resourcefulness in an epic of survival and the will to ...”

“... of correct social behaviour”.’ (The historian, I learn a hundred pages later, is Paul Robinson.) Brown won’t leave Bloom alone. He says that since his masturbating on Sandymount Strand is shared, in some sense, with Gerty, it’s a case of onanisme à deux. And since nearly all modern sex is onanistic ‘inasmuch as its goal is ...”

“... back tae snowk at his bockin ... Grumphie douks i the burn, an syne rows again i the glaur. (II Peter 2.22: ‘The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’). Except perhaps for a few scholars, no one, however Scots, is going to know all the words in this translation; most Scots will not know a great ...”

“... Harbor, and starred Jack Benny, Betty Grable, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, who tap-danced on Hitler’s coffin. Hecht also wrote propagandist radio plays and, in 1943, another pageant. We Will Never Die was dedicated to the ‘two million Jewish dead of Europe’ and told the story of the Jewish people from antiquity to the ...”

“... like the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn that flowered on Christmas Day. The Puritan preacher Hugh Peter wanted to pull down Stonehenge, and the 18th-century Baptist Thomas Robinson boasted that he had ‘killed’ 40 stones at Avebury with his own hands. But, like the radicals who proposed that all churches and cathedrals ...”

“... on a kind of tray.’ Yet coitus is nearly impossible. John tries it on with a boy called Julian Robinson, but John’s legs are almost entirely inflexible and Julian’s are floppy, because he has polio. As the two rub against each other, John feels a flash of pain – Julian’s ‘heavy callipers scraping against my legs. I winced, he lurched backwards ...”

“... was quite transfixing. When you were listening to Bryan Ferry, according to the style panjandrum Peter York, ‘you were listening to a singer whose whole approach said: “I’m not singing, I’m being a singer.”’ There’s a crucial difference. Everyday British life in the 1980s took a turn towards the performative; style became a matter of exhibiting ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”