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“... of Ireland are therefore of particular significance in connection with the new initiative. In the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, under the title ‘Irish Identities’, he developed an approach to the problem more complex than that of any earlier nationalist leader. At the same time, he made very explicit his belief that ‘ultimately there has to be a ...”

“... the worthless and salacious ‘yellowpress’ anti-Ranter tracts. This is like tying a large lead weight to the neck of whatever weakling kitten of the imagination has survived immersion in the tedium of his text, and sinking it finally to the bottom of the pond. How, then, did it come about that both contemporaries and subsequent historians have supposed ...”

“... involves a break with Deconstruction. Norris argues in this book, as he has argued before, that Richard Rorty’s formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as these things are practised in the ...”

“... rather than in print. In his absorbing case-study of the treatment of deviance in Habsburg Spain, Richard Kagan has exploited the trial records of Lucrecia de Leon and her associates, and in particular four registers recording her dreams over a period of two and a half years from November 1587 to her arrest for trial by the Inquisition in Toledo in May ...”

“... a delirium of information which should, by rights, have been terrific. But it sags under its own weight. The author carries his burden of learning heavily, driven by a remorseless will to establish a ‘dialogue’ between the title and the work, to unearth a rationale below any surface arbitrariness of titling, and certainly never to allow that ...”

“... of kittens. More than half the space is divided off by a fence of stretched wires – perhaps Richard Serra’s standing slabs and rolled up sheet of metal are not so well poised as to be proof against a cannoning child. This means that one of the two Barnett Newman paintings can only be seen obliquely, that neither can be advanced on and retreated ...”

“... example, with Augie March’s ‘I am an American ...’), the headlong stride of the style, its weight and energy, sweep us forward unresisting. Here, however, the clarion call of Ms Velde’s name gives pause. It is very American, yet it is not quite contemporary. We seem to hear in it an echo of an earlier New York scene, of the jewelled and grandly ...”

“... absurd will tell us that the tonnage of books about the Second World War has finally exceeded the weight of ammunition expended in its course. On the face of it, the scope and variety of this literature is enormous. It ranges across much of the globe, from Normandy to New Guinea, from Tunis to Moscow. It recounts the exploits of the fighting men of dozens of ...”

“... he called ‘Man of the 20th Century’. This grandiose scheme provides one of the sources of Richard Powers’s first novel. The title, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, refers to a photograph of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like ...”

“... characterised Lauda’s experience of F1 has been there since the early days of motorsport, as Richard Williams shows in his capacious new biography of Richard Seaman, a largely forgotten English driver of the interwar years. During the 1920s and 1930s many drivers were gentleman enthusiasts who owned their own cars and ...”

“... to cost those who offer it so little and benefit those who receive it so much. ‘Why, then,’ Richard Sennett asks, ‘should it be in short supply?’ Though Sennett frequently defines such scarcity as a lack of ‘mutual respect’ – as if none of us, no matter who we are, gets enough of it – a good many of his examples and much of his analysis ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... an intersectional feminist’. Rachel Holmes’s new biography of Pankhurst rightly gives equal weight to the three great causes – feminism, left internationalism and anti-imperialism – to which Pankhurst devoted her life. Almost a thousand pages long, and weighing in at three and a half pounds, it is clearly intended to be the definitive ...”

“... in training for an aerobically intensive sport, it takes a phenomenal calorie intake to put on weight. Either they’re eating cake after training all day every day, or they’re on the sauce. Nobody says that Ronaldo is on the sauce. In fact, he cheekily said that the president of Brazil was on the sauce, when Lula had the temerity to ask the national ...”

“... desire to restore it seems both heroic and quixotic: an act justified only by perfect faith.I read Richard Goy’s Venetian Vernacular Architecture – mainly about traditional housing in the lagoon but a wonderful introduction to Venetian building in general – and lying in my hotel room, looking up at the high ceiling, I knew that the ...”