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“... mother caught her tits in the mangle.’ (This ancient punch-line was used quite recently by Daley Thompson to celebrate his Olympic victory.) When such stories are ploddingly told in Booker-McConnell prize-winning novels, by J.M. Coetzee or Keri Hulme, the books are described as ‘compassionate’ and the judges, at least, seem deeply moved. With Norman ...”

“... the massive 1988 exhibition of Degas’s work, and by the publication in the same year of Richard Thompson’s magisterial primer, Degas: The Nudes. Feminist art criticism, in particular, has added richness and edge to debates about the relationship between form and meaning. That relationship is the focus of Anthea Callen’s study of the visualisation of the ...”

“... and lack of curiosity, as if making it easy on themselves, and easy for the reader, is the true mark of ‘authenticity’, of being neither fussy nor pretentious. It is an entertaining and puzzling aspect of our book culture that the works that sell squillions of copies are usually the ones that make everything in life less interesting than it actually ...”

“... to their courts to sack the hangman. The truest note, I think, is struck by the American scholar Mark Tushnet, who always has something sane to say in this area. The US experience of judicial review, he concludes, ‘is nothing to get excited about one way or the other. The Supreme Court has not done much that could not have been accomplished, in perhaps a ...”

“... This was Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy’s purpose in organising a conference in 1985 to mark the 450th anniversary of Fisher’s execution. The proceedings of this are now published as Humanism, Reform and the Reformation. Several essays emphasise Fisher’s career as an outstanding scholar. An important paper by Stephen ...”

“... on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about valuable ...”

“... is here for tears, nothing to wail or knock the breast.’ Samson’s father, like Mark Antony, assumes that his audience could choose to mourn their dead hero either by weeping or not weeping, and that he can offer cogent reasons to move them one way or the other. In that sense, ‘a tear is an intellectual thing,’ as Blake puts it in ‘The ...”

“... of articulating “the identity of their interests”’ (the phrase is taken from E.P. Thompson). There is absolutely no evidence for this. It relies on a wishful view of the 99 per cent and an absurd caricature of the 1 per cent, who are described as having been revealed ‘as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly ...”

“... University Press and later as an English lecturer at the university itself, Williams made his mark through those he published, those he encouraged and, above all, those he impressed. He struck people as amazing. His energy was famous, his conversation a flood. At OUP, he would march into the office, bound up the stairs and immediately write down the ...”

“... but (once Glover has got hold of them) by William Cowper, Byron, the sailor-satirist Edward Thompson, and the anonymous author of a splendid poem called ‘The Stage Coach’, much anthologised in the Georgian period. A few lines are quoted from each of these writers, and every single quotation contains one or more obvious errors – often, it ...”

“... about something by Butterfield, is unflattering. ‘Not a small church’ raises a large question mark over the success of W.J. Hopkins’s St Eadburga’s, Worcester. The use of negatives is sparing but effective. ‘Widely unknown’ (describing a minor architect) is one of the best.By the end of the project Pevsner felt that he was too tired and the ...”

“... there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I donned washing-up gloves, picked it up by the tail and put it in the bin. I blocked all the holes I could see and hoped that would be the end of the matter. But for months afterwards I was haunted by thoughts of rats. At night, I imagined I could hear the ...”

“... work of ‘resistance’ and it shows. The Times on 27 May ran a lead story by Maggie Haberman, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, headlined in diminishing type: ‘Kushner Is Said to Have Mulled Russia Channel – Trump Tower Meeting – Aim was a Secret Means for Communications During Transition.’ Those lines say all that the story has to say – the ...”

“... life, he would stubbornly defend his communist convictions and just as stubbornly crave every mark of status and honour. How did​ he become a historian? Evans dates the transformation from his return to Cambridge as a postgraduate student in 1946; I’m not sure I agree. True, Hobsbawm received his PhD in 1951 and held a junior research fellowship at ...”

“... as concomitant with but not inevitably subservient to that of the young United States: 1776 might mark the founding of the US, but he claims it also marked the declaration of independence of another ‘empire’ two thousand miles away – the Lakota Sioux. A former farming people from the Missouri River valley, the Lakota had started a series of explorations ...”