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“... to turn on the strange goings-on of 1548, which involved Catherine Parr and her fourth husband Thomas Seymour, brother of the Protector Somerset, a marriage which, thanks to Elizabeth’s presence in the household, became something of a ménage à trois: risky romps in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, the curious episode in the garden when Seymour cut her dress ...”

“... of occupation.’ As recently as 25 September 2001, three former American Ambassadors to Japan – Thomas Foley, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Armacost, the president of the Brookings Institution, and Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice-President – wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post denouncing Congress for its willingness ...”

“... are by Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second written in a sort of Finneganese, and long thought to have been the work of Joyce ...”

“... caprice, but a nymphomaniac and serial adulteress who was properly tried and legally executed. Thomas More, the genial philosopher, was not a saint but a sadistic bigot. The real Mary Tudor wasn’t the hate figure of myth. Pious, well-meaning and emotionally fragile, she’d been manipulated by Cardinal Pole, a ruthless éminence rouge with his sights on ...”

“... can be traced in the records of domesticated herds and their surpassing individuals. William Pitt’s report to the Board of Agriculture on the state of pig-breeding in Staffordshire in 1796 includes an engraving of an anonymous painting of a pig belonging to Mr Dyott of Freeford Manor, Lichfield. The pig’s coat is dark, the snout long ...”

“... Here are the nominees for the greatest bad argument in political theory. They are: Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the Republic. Why them? Each of the candidates is hallowed as a Penguin Classic. Each has been foisted on freshman generations in Pol Phil 101 ...”

“... The Oval Window is packed with lines from a 1981 book on database systems). I once asked Thomas Nagel where I could find the line attributed to him in Not-You (1993) – ‘Love of semiconductors is not enough’ – and initially he denied having written it. When, having found the answer elsewhere, I put it to him, he was delightfully ...”

“... world could know itself. He was, if reluctantly, an adornment to the Prussian court of Frederick William IV, and a willing favourite of Queen Victoria. Innumerable biographies of all sizes have been published since his death, and his life is legendary though not unduly eventful. Now we have it in the kind of detail few need. Larry Todd’s book, in the ...”

“... political power, and is the more glaring when the form that power takes is force majeure. Contra Thomas Nagel and other US liberals, leaders who can segue fluently from blowjob to prayer-breakfast should give us pause for thought. The gospelling blag takes a darker turn in ‘the new military humanism’ or, in other words, killing people as an act of ...”

“... been made for his work. Fante has been compared to Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, James Farrell, William Saroyan and Nathanael West. In 1977, a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s ...”

“... that his body was altered in some fundamental way; there was a frog or serpent inside him. In 1685 Thomas Willis judged the melancholic-hypochondriac patient to be prey to ‘wandering pains, also cramps and numbness with a sense of formication’, as well as low spirits, wandering attention and fear of death. Since then the term ‘hypochondria’ has ...”

“... and destabilising contribution to late Elizabethan politics of a succession of Catholic writers, William Allen and Robert Parsons (or Persons) among them, who were bent on destroying or discrediting the regime, or securing a successor to Elizabeth who would reintroduce or at least tolerate their religion. Lake is not impressed by the recent claim that ...”

“... approach predicts the incommensurability of sufficiently divergent outlooks, anticipating Thomas Kuhn on the structure of scientific revolutions by more than thirty years. He went on to interpret causal laws and conditional statements not in terms of causal or conditional facts but by appeal to rules for judgment. To hold that if A happens B will ...”

“... themselves. One sign of this is the praise Williams extends to some abolitionists – Thomas Clarkson, James Ramsay, James Stephen the father, and James Stephen the son – and not others.Capitalism and Slavery​ has very little to say about the anti-slavery movement itself. Williams praised its less compromised progenitors like Clarkson and ...”

“... of delirious associations and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and ...”