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“... Attila, Genghiz and the like ‘fell outside the scope of Oxford’s history school’. He read military history instead and won his Blue as a boxer. In 1930 he was back in Abyssinia, attending the Duke of Gloucester at the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie, whom he had already encountered as Ras Tafari. There are sharp words for a fellow ...”

“... people are an aspect of journeying, as in immortal books like Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days, or Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary. Bruce Chatwin’s narrative is divided by pauses for quotation and reflection. He has more than a touch of Rimbaud in him, and indeed he quotes from Une Saison en Enfer: ‘For a long time I prided myself I would possess every ...”

“... Ben Sanderson, played by Nicolas Cage, enters an exclusive Beverly Hills bar and approaches Peter Brackman, an agent he knows, to borrow a few dollars. Plainly worried about his reputation, Brackman gives Ben the money but adds: ‘I think it would be best if you didn’t contact me again.’ The reason Ben inspires such fear and hostility in his ...”

“... dominated the group as it moved towards abstraction. The following year Hepworth found in Herbert Read a critical champion whose lasting support was invaluable in establishing her reputation. It was the start of the rise to fame, but not the end of the struggle. Hepworth’s concern for her public standing kept her constantly on the watch for groups to join ...”

“... events. Enwezor’s Biennale is more interesting for what you learn than what you see; as Peter Campbell wrote of Sarah Sze, another artist of arrangement (and also at the Biennale), you don’t so much look at what’s in front of you as read it. There are attempts to question underlying attitudes. The artists of ...”

“... hostility to Clark was demonstrated by two incidents not long after his death. In August 1993 Peter Ryan delivered, in the conservative journal Quadrant, an extraordinary attack on Clark’s six-volume History of Australia, which he had shepherded through publication at Melbourne University Press. He was, he said, ashamed to have published it: Clark was a ...”

“... bright child if I could have had her just average.’ According to Buck’s definitive biographer, Peter Conn, on the way to the Nobel Prize ceremony she told her sister that she would ‘much rather be having a baby than going to Sweden’: ‘Nothing means overwhelmingly much to me, since the fundamental inevitable for me must remain inevitable.’ And ...”

“... of the kind of ‘artificial reason’ fostered among common lawyers. According to Bourke, Burke read the French Revolution as an outgrowth not of genuine Enlightenment, but of a ‘spurious’ pseudo-Enlightenment founded on the dogmatic claims of deism. In this way Bourke daringly reappropriates Burke’s conservative counter-Enlightenment classic ...”

“... each other, not assessing or criticising each other’s work, not building on it. If they even read each other, they would have to do so indiscriminately and thus inefficiently, for they couldn’t draw on the social knowledge that tells them which authors are worth reading and which are cranks, whose results can be relied on and whose should be viewed ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... sense of identity’, called Freud and the Non-European (2003). ‘Identity,’ we read there, ‘cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed.’ The context is Freud’s reminding us that Moses was an Egyptian.Edward was ...”

“... alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice. Dripping with froideur, an imperious Mandelson nailed the upstart coalitionists for their absurd sense of entitlement. Hannah Rothschild’s vanity promo, unaccountably offered to the ...”

“... the story, Hughes wrote a poem about his caller, and the following night the creature returned, read the new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”