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“... launched a fleet of biographies, editions and collections of his letters over the last century. David Brown’s fine Life is the latest to grapple with Adams’s paradoxes and limitations: his inconsistent ego, his contradictions, his Waspy waspishness. It deals with his reserve and self-consciousness, his reluctance to risk failure, his unconvincing ...”

“... their surroundings, and tried to come to terms with modernity? ‘This is a political history,’ David Vital’s first sentence states baldly. What interests him most is the legal relationship between Jews and the states they lived in, their evolving civic status, the nature and growth of hostility to them (though not its causes), and the emergence of ...”

“... of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans present. They felt it inappropriate that a leading English politician should condemn his countrymen in such forthright terms in front of foreigners – as they saw themselves. They were, of course, wrong. No ...”

“... tracts of time that might otherwise get colonised by anxious thought. And who wants that? Bertrand Russell said that people will do almost anything rather than think. Despite one’s best efforts, though, thoughts still sometimes come. Then, as Beckett says elsewhere, thinking can do proleptic duty, ensuring that rogue thoughts are repeated over and ...”

“... Travelodge because they’re ‘pet-friendly’ – on this walk we were accompanied by our Jack Russell instead of my usual black dog. Child and dog slept heavily, but I scrunched up by the small window, smoking illegally and staring out to the northwest where the sodium-lit realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In ...”

“... priggishness I dislike so intensely.’ Poets with whom she became involved – George Barker and David Gascoyne, for example – are sadly unrecognisable now as the vibrant young bucks she saw or imagined half a century ago. (She had a sharp eye, though, for dirty nails, mean and common facial expressions and weak chins.) So the literary, whoever they ...”

“... suggest. One of its products is the kind of wildly inconsistent rhetoric dissected by David Bromwich in Politics by Other Means: the insistence that you are only an authentic black if you identify your self with your blackness, only an authentic gay if you identify your self with your gayness, etc. Another is the sort of curriculum reform which ...”

“... musings, Smilla is engagingly quick to deflate her extensive range of reference: ‘Bertrand Russell wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don’t know what we’re talking about or to what extent what we say is true or false. That’s the way I feel about cooking.’ Wit sustains her as it enlivens the story – she even manages to come ...”

“... failure of the imagination for an insight into the way reality has to be’. Even I think Bertrand Russell was being a bit cavalier when he said that ‘the universe is just there.’ And when we hit the very funny chapter called ‘A Brief History of Nothing’, we realise that Holt is an expert juggler of the paradoxes that go with so many kinds of ...”

“... lecturer, who, along with a significant number of radicals, later fell in with the Russophobe, David Urquhart, and like most of Urquhart’s followers, became a devotee of the Turkish bath. (The mania for hydropathy or water-cures is a little-known coda to Chartism, and worthy of further study.) Included, too, is Joseph Barker, another Methodist ...”

“... clerk who shared a shack with a shunter which they called ‘Utopia’. He read Shaw, Wells and Russell, and stopped saluting the laird (but not the doctor, the minister or the teacher) because he ‘contributed nothing to the community’ and wasn’t very intelligent: ‘There’s naething in him except what he puts in with a spoon.’ By contrast, the ...”

“... on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class ...”

“... them could doubt that the bombers were Syrians and Palestinians. The series, mainly written by David Leppard, who worked closely with the Scottish police team, ended with a scoop: white plastic residue found at Lockerbie was traced back to alarm clocks bought by the Dalkomini gang. There seemed no more room for argument. ‘The Sunday Times ...”

“... in this story, though classical architecture certainly was. Duveen’s favourite architect, John Russell Pope, supplied a mausoleum for the Huntingtons, adapted Frick’s townhouse as a public gallery and designed the National Gallery of Art. The increasingly difficult and radical character of modern art may have further reinforced these preferences. And ...”

“... it finally appeared in the journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell. Russell was a major public intellectual at the time, and it was his introduction that effectively secured publication (though Wittgenstein abhorred it).The first English translation appeared in 1922, alongside the ...”