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“... Jessie Royce Landis’s performance as Grace Kelly’s mother than for either Grace Kelly or Cary Grant. One scene is now unintentionally funny: Cary Grant, as the reformed cat burglar, invites the Lloyd’s insurance agent (John Williams) to have lunch at his villa overlooking the Mediterranean. ...”

“... By the time he was 34, Thomas Macaulay had had a fellowship at Trinity, practised law for a year or two, sat in the Commons for four, and been appointed to a seat on the Supreme Council in India. On the boat to Calcutta, he wrote to Ellis, he had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon on Rome, Sismondi on France, Mill on India, ‘the seven thick folios of Biographica Brittanica’ and ‘the 70 volumes of Voltaire ...”

“... structure, he himself will always look for the organisation of the court. In examining Thomas Cromwell’s relations with Anne Boleyn and with the Privy Chamber, he has made it very hard indeed to see the rise of Thomas Cromwell as marking the beginning of modern bureaucracy. His evidence, as Sir Geoffrey Elton ...”

“... and exorcistic rituals. Amongst geologists, the villain-in-chief, endlessly execrated, is the Rev. Thomas Burnet. Leading the heroes home are James Hutton and Sir Charles Lyell. What was Burnet’s sin? He was the Judas who supposedly sold out geology to Scripture. In his Sacred Theory of the Earth – which appeared just before Newton’s Principia – Burnet ...”

“... person to the BBC and the Arts Council, though when Morgan proposed Finlay for an Arts Council grant he refused to accept it. Finlay was a careful reader of the TLS, and fumed at a ‘smart-alecky’ review of some avant-garde magazines, deciding it was written by John Willett (its real author was in fact his near-namesake Ian Hamilton, never the warmest ...”

“... said some colleagues wouldn’t join events with the word ‘refugee’ in the programme: ‘Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “refugee writer”. The classification is problematic.’ Two novels published in English last year reject the paradigm. The Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost came to attention after ...”

“... readers grappling with the new transformational ideas for the first time. In the diaries of Thomas Archer Hirst of Halifax he has found the best example of an inquiring mind he could have wished for. Hirst copied passages from Vestiges and stitched them to others from different sources that had caught his eye, effectively constructing his own ...”

“... There’s your big six. Now get a life. When he wins (with his wife and producer Emma Thomas at his side), the engagingly modest Nolan will roll out the speech he knows by heart, about the Bomb as the great adventure and turning point of modern times, the exhilarating teamwork that gave us the big bang, and so on. The same attitude gave us ...”

“... state. The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductive party, with Thomas Hobbes at its head, saw human motivation as entirely egoistic at root (Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of law which protects the weak multitude). Locke’s State of Nature was much less ...”

“... texts that look extensively at the slave trade – Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it (1695) – are structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured bodies.Reflecting on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the ...”

“... in British reforming circles and even more so among their Revolutionary American cousins. Thomas Jefferson regarded it as belonging with the handful of books essential for understanding the new forms of civil government being built in America. Capital punishment was not abolished in any of the new American jurisdictions, despite the efforts of some of ...”

“... delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a ...”

“... many poets have discovered many different keys to unlock certain doors. For emotional power, Thomas Wyatt, circa 1536: From depth of sin, and from a deep despair, From depth of death, from depth of heart’s sorrow, From this deep cave, of darkness deep repair, Thee have I called, O Lord, to be my borrow. Thou in my voice, O Lord, perceive and hear My ...”

“... just won the National Book Award and Coates recently received a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant. Coates has said that his book was originally conceived as a collection of essays about the Civil War, and that it was the death of Brown, and his relatively privileged son’s incredulous reaction to the failure to indict anyone for his killing, that ...”

“... historical prudence is welcome, because it may well be that hysteria – this ‘Proteus’ as Thomas Sydenham called it in the 17th century – is never anything other than what we say about it, and that hysterics adapt themselves to doctors’ expectations and theories, thereby confirming them. This was the position maintained, notably, by Hippolyte ...”