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“... hand’s in flower ... My blood excites this petal dross.’ The critic keeps his cool and poise, ready for all surprise assaults; the poet has no shock absorbers, is a jittery wreck of nerves, drink, cigarette smoke, sleeplessness and pain. All this suggests something bordering on schizophrenia, the right hand not knowing what the left is up to: but ...”

“... union of Churches was never going to be possible. Looking at this question, a reviewer is the more ready to be persuaded by Dr Larner’s tentative suggestion that the differences between English and Scottish witchcraft prosecutions can in large measure be explained by differences between the English and Scottish legal systems. 1641 was the high-water mark of ...”

“... his generous willingness to regard Lord Longford as something better than a buffoon. Commendably ready to hold an opinion no matter who agrees with him, Levin finds himself siding with Lord Longford over the matter of Myra Hindley. ‘In this matter,’ he says, ‘I am of Lord Longford’s opinion.’ But on those few occasions when one finds one’s views ...”

“... and the emotional life of a celebrity cook. Not just how to cook a mushroom risotto like Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain, but what it’s like to be Jamie or Nigella or Gordon or Tony: Happy Days with the Naked Chef, How to be a Domestic Goddess, In the Heat of the Kitchen, Kitchen Confidential. And then – as if we ...”

“... students, he droned on about football and Neville Chamberlain, unable to make eye contact. For Oliver Stone, who dramatised the event in his clumsy 1995 biopic, this was the moment Nixon received the revelation of what Stone called ‘the Beast’: even though he, the president, may want peace, the system won’t let him stop the Vietnam War. Feeney, more ...”

“... colonies. He himself was arrested, charged with blasphemy, convicted – despite being defended by Oliver Cromwell – and punished by being whipped through the streets of London and then thrown in jail. His followers had to flee, from the wrath of both the Government and the Quakers, who disowned him. The plausibility of Nayler’s messianic claims derived in ...”

“... then installed in a creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist. Yet, even for penguins, rejection comes: after the winter huddling and the pre-fledge commutes, the deep dives and the exhausting feeds, the mother will waddle off across the tundra, never to be seen by her children again. Abandonment, we ...”

“... anyone who could pay. Describing a tour of the abbey in his 1762 satire The Citizen of the World, Oliver Goldsmith wrote:The gentleman that lies here is remarkable, very remarkable – for a tomb in Westminster-abbey … the gentleman was rich, and his friends, as is usual in such a case, told him he was great. He readily believed them; the guardians of the ...”

“... much the same effect. ‘There was an honesty, a truth of writing, that took my breath away. Be ready. Be seated,’ Verghese warns. Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that ‘to read this book is to feel that Dr Kalanithi still lives, with enormous power to influence the lives of others though he is gone’. ‘Unmissable.’ The New Yorker called it ...”

“... present, as it were, love and honour; Scobie, his wife Louise and his girlfriend Helen afford a ready-made tableau like Orestes and Hermione and Andromaque. The complete arbitrariness available to the Classical stage is so cunningly naturalised that we hardly notice at first reading how the parts have been taken from the contrivance of stage dilemmas, with ...”

“... bullying editor Rudiger. Leventhal strives not to be cowed: Too many people looking for work were ready to allow anything. The habit of agreement was strong, terribly strong. Say anything you like to them, call them fools and they smiled, turn their beliefs inside out and they smiled, despise them and they might grow red, but they went on smiling because they ...”

“... some other.’ This will seem a mild complaint to Richard Baxter after his fierce clashes with Oliver Cromwell, and his denunciation by Judge Jeffreys: Oy! Oy! What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain that he could not conform? Richard, Richard, dost thou think we’ll hear thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old fellow, an old ...”

“... guns, each carried with more than three hundred charges and projectiles. Six rocket-tubes and ‘a ready supply of war rockets’ were carried by each division, along with many hundredweights of gun cotton (nitrocellulose) with specialist demolition parties, which were used to destroy defensive stockades, palace walls and even sacred trees. There were fourteen ...”

“... the ‘cheerful ending’ that Howells would have preferred for The American, he was also ready to take their critical engagement as a form of appreciation. ‘After your approval ... nothing could give me greater delight than your censure,’ he wrote to his friend Lizzie Boott, who had apparently shared Howells’s disappointment with The ...”

“... visible effort, which might well have been dangerous, as the pelts have been dated to the time of Oliver Cromwell, when any such practice was certain to be understood as witchcraft or heresy and severely punished. The leader of the excavation believes that this cult has continued in secret to the present day. It seems to have been a ceremonial practice, not a ...”