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“... his eyes, conceding he was oversensitive. But he was also hinting at the stubbornness of the powers-that-be, that rule our lives and the universe. The gods. Aeolus. Wind. Chaudhuri’s debt to Joyce could hardly be plainer, though the Bloomishness of Radhesh’s exasperating vitality is entirely unconscious on the character’s part (and they have their ...”

“... she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give their players room to move. The Letter of Marque opens with Jack Aubrey dismissed the ...”

“... on stone, a few lead tablets inscribed with curses and buried for the attention of the powers below. Everyday communications, on wood or papyrus, have rotted away. Or so it might have been thought, until in 1973-5 the Vindolanda tablets turned up, preserved anaerobically in an ancient floor of impacted bracken and human wastes. That find allows us ...”

“... or well-being, and that this involves a many-sided flourishing, realising your historically-bred powers and capacities to the full. It is this which class-society forestalls, and what it forestalls it with, among other weapons, is morality. Freud would later identify moral ideology, or the superego, as a kind of sickness, a frenzied sadistic idealism which ...”

“... The ‘posture of War’ has driven incipient and established states alike to increase their powers, extend their competencies, centralise their operations, deepen their penetration of social life, and enlarge and rationalise their apparatuses of taxation, adjudication, regulation and surveillance. Refined in the crucible of war, the ...”

“... of alien oppression now triumphantly shrugged off. Nor in practice have those current Great Powers which are still in essence imperial found coming to terms with empire difficult. China, for instance, continues to retain territories that were conquered by Chinese emperors long after the Spanish and Portuguese invasions of the New World, and does not ...”

“... in 1948 demonstrated his political nerve against the favourite and eventual loser of that year, Thomas E. Dewey. The implied comparison, in 2020, was with the passive, careful, non-reactive campaign of Joe Biden, who arranged to be caught on camera in a face mask, projecting grandfatherly reassurance from his basement headquarters. Biden’s mental debility ...”

“... had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its ...”

“... It is a daunting thought, particularly as no one seems ever to have thrown away a letter from Thomas or Jane: the libraries of the world are stuffed with them. Yet I have no doubt at all that this mammoth editorial task is very well worth doing, and it is being done extremely well. The Carlyles were extraordinary human beings and, as it ...”

“... Thomas Becket​ was not the first archbishop of Canterbury to meet a violent end – Archbishop Alphege was killed by Vikings in 1012 – but he was unique in other ways. Unlike his predecessors, he was not particularly learned and wrote nothing except letters (the 12th-century equivalent of texting), of which 189 survive ...”

“... scratching that accounts for the monkey’s having it.) The worry about consciousness is that, in Thomas Nagel’s resonant phrase, there is ‘something that it’s like’ to be a conscious creature, but there is, presumably, nothing that it’s like to be a tree; and there is surely nothing that it’s like to be a rock or anything else that is ...”

“... that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free ...”

“... the Merchant Adventurers, which led to his making the acquaintance of a fellow guildsman called Thomas Cromwell. Vaughan rose to a degree of professional eminence on Cromwell’s coat-tails, beginning in the years when Cromwell himself was merely a protégé of Thomas Wolsey. Together they helped Wolsey dissolve ...”

“... When Thomas Jefferson left the Presidency he wrote to Dupont de Nemours: ‘Never did a prisoner released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the time in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself to the boisterous ocean of political passion ...”

“... anecdote casting the artist in the role of perpetual adolescent. Nobody doubts that Dylan Thomas died of drink and a regressive, infantile personality: but the thing that is remembered about his last days is a remark (‘I’ve just had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record’) which superbly typifies the kind of thing his public would ...”