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“... a visualisation, for urban eyes, of the simple datum that the city is parched.Six years ago Richard Thake, a Conservative politician from just north of St Albans, pointed out at a summit called to address the crisis that Hertfordshire was the heaviest consumer of water per head in England. ‘If we go on at this rate,’ he warned, ‘we are in danger ...”

“... if there were something saintly about him.After his death in 1936, Chesterton was neglected by English departments more interested in The Waste Land than in rollicking ballads of the English road. But he still fascinated enough people to be given hagiographic treatments in the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and ...”

“... indeed in England, with the result that, in the later 19th century and the first half of the 20th, English history became the intellectual laboratory within which ideas about the character or distinctiveness of the new type of society were explored.A common thread in the variously inflected accounts of this transformation was the claim that, alongside the new ...”

“... view. (‘You are sure to lose it,’ Harris told him. ‘You haven’t a dog’s chance and the English despise the beaten.’) Just then, however, Douglas arrived and berated Harris for his advice. When Douglas stormed out of the restaurant, Wilde followed, saying: ‘It is not friendly of you, Frank, it really is not friendly.’ He was not going to take ...”

“... fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject. Seven years ...”

“... for imminent invasion, the Dutch sailing up the Thames. Paranoia runs deep, it runs all through English literature, and it is often associated with the river. You arrive at a sensationalist hack like Sax Rohmer with his fear of the Chinese. He wrote a book called The Devil Doctor, published in 1916. Cover illustrations for cheap railway editions show Fu ...”

“... to release these documents. This is rather like writing about the Watergate scandal and applauding Richard Nixon’s forthrightness in finally handing over the White House tapes. If the citizens of Hanford are unable to accept what really happened there it wouldn’t be unusual. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Françoise Zonabend’s The Nuclear ...”

“... absurdly cumbersome, and seems to have been, if not the originator, then the promulgator of pidgin English: when his interpreter admitted there was nothing the Chinese could do about their dishonesty since it was innate, Anson transcribed this in A Voyage around the World as ‘Chinese man very great rogue truly, but have fashion, no can help.’ Still, they ...”

“... stalk. Now shoot him just at the base of the left ear for kindness.’ The macaronics cross Saxon English with Berlitz Swahili: ‘Keiti says you mganga with the lion.’ And the once effective sententiae sound like Poor Richard staring into the bottom of the glass: ‘Everybody does other people harm’; ‘Nothing is as ...”

“... a prominent feature of the university world. Without the overwhelming skill of Claus Moser and Richard Layard in statistical analysis and presentation the old guard might have died slowly and hard. Although the Robbins Committee must be absolved from causing all subsequent disasters, their misfortunes and mistakes cannot be accounted small. In the first ...”

“... men in the country’. He graduated ‘magna cum laude in Literature especially Greek and English’ after taking courses which included some comparative literature and Grandgent’s course on Dante. Even then, ‘Harvard had a long tradition of emphasis on writing, especially creative writing,’ and students ‘were encouraged to write verse and ...”

“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that she hit upon the idea of ...”

“... very level-headed on this question: he notes the mistakes made on both sides, some of which – as Richard Neustadt was the first to point out in his 1970 study Alliance Politics – actually arose from the intimate nature of the exchanges between the two governments and the false conclusions which this assumed intimacy was liable sometimes to promote. But he ...”

“... in science, having been born in Galton’s aristocratic notions of the natural worthiness of the English upper class, taken to its evil extreme by Nazi eugenicists, and too readily used by American scientists to rationalise racial injustice.’ Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, had explicitly raised the question of nature v. nurture with reference to ...”