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“... About Rousseau, as about Romanticism, it is tempting to use the word ‘disorderly’. Maurice Cranston showed us in the first volume of this, the most masterly of biographies how he had spent his early life as a wanderer and adventurer, he had been an itinerant tutor, a humble music-copier, an ambitious composer; the lover of a Swiss countess and the secretary to a diplomat; he had become a fashionable writer with an obsession about preserving his independence; he was an uneasy Catholic who needed a religion and who thought that he had found it in Protestantism; he was someone who discovered that his waistcoat was soaked in tears but who had not been aware that he had been weeping ...”

“... the unsurprising movie was ‘based’ on this book. What it is really based on (very loosely) is Judith Thurman’s workmanlike biography of the Baroness, Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, which Penguin Books has happily reissued, with a picture of ogling film stars on the cover. Judith Thurman was Associate Producer ...”

“... already know a story, it is by no means always easy to identify representations of it. A burning bush in a stained-glass window, or a man sticking out of a whale’s mouth, or a baby in a stable, will be recognised for what they are, no doubt: but even learned church visitors commonly need a guidebook to identify the majority of the scenes. And there is no ...”

“... in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six years, until George W. Bush brought a host of the Agreement’s critics into his Administration, and they set about dismantling it, thus fulfilling their own prophecy and initiating another dangerous confrontation with Pyongyang. The same folks who brought us the invasion of Iraq and a ...”

“... to Kinsella, the meaning of the urban Australian’s nostalgia for ‘the centre (read: the bush)’ is ‘probably the prime debate of mid-Nineties Australian poetics, certainly among male poets’. Born in 1963, John Kinsella grew up in the Perth suburbs but he also worked on wheatbelt farms and sheep stations in the Avon Valley area, sixty miles west ...”

“... helped raise French money for work on Choquequirao. There are lots more sites to find in the bush; we sometimes pass by what even to our untutored eyes are obviously ancient relics. At Qoriwayrachina, a day further on, there is a vast network of buildings spread out between 6000 and 12,000 feet, all over a massive ridge. The area has hardly begun to be ...”

“... analysts and gender theorists – ‘fashion civilians’, in the words of Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman – as well as superstar designers, magazine editors, high-spending celebrities, and chic purveyors and curators of front-line style. Fashion studies involves men as well as women, and has its own scholarly quarterly, Fashion Theory: The Journal of ...”

“... were dismayed by the reversal of traditional Indian foreign policy under the BJP. The attitude to Bush after 9/11 and to Sharon (who was invited on a state visit after the Israeli offensive in Jenin) was not popular. The architect of the new turn, the foreign minister Yashwant Sinha, lost his Jharkhand constituency to a Communist, who won by a handsome ...”

“... married and started dairy-farming – and yet even I was almost seduced by the myth of the alien bush, as I began learning to write poetry. A received sensibility almost had me subscribing to its agenda, in spite of my awareness that the bush wasn’t alien to me at all, but a deeply loved vastness containing danger and ...”

“... that there was the cattleman’s niece, who threw a party for the writer, hoping to activate the bush telegraph. Later there was Scrubbie, the battered, emaciated heroine of the ghost-town service-station. ‘She was one of my proud, independent country-women ... generous, and lively, and loving, and hardworking, and she had been beaten like a jade.’ The ...”

“... motion which, with his energetic assistance, would eventually lead to its abrogation by George W. Bush. In 1966, Teller met Ronald Reagan, then running for the governorship of California, and, once elected, Reagan accepted his invitation to tour the Livermore lab, where Teller and his colleagues told him about plans to build a vast anti-missile defence ...”

“... at the Kinsey Institute. The central figure behind the current anti-Kinsey campaign is Dr Judith Reisman, a 69-year-old former songwriter for the children’s TV programme Captain Kangaroo, who served as Reagan’s porn tsar in the 1980s (she received a $734,000 grant from the Justice Department to evaluate the images of children in Playboy, Hustler ...”

“... More recently, the question of originality and essence has been articulated by Judith Butler in terms that combine philosophy and the history of sexuality. Butler’s assertion that ‘gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of “the original” … reveals the original to be ...”

“... I saw on my return from St Lucia were his feet planted in the sand in a photo portrait taken by Judith Aronson for her show Likenesses at the Royal West of England Academy. Many poets and writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s ...”

“... no female Shakespeare, Woolf traces the likely career of his imaginary and equally talented sister Judith, following her from patchy education to rebellion and flight to London, where every door including the stage door is closed to her and the streets are dangerous. There follow a pragmatic liaison, unwanted pregnancy, suicide and an unmarked grave at ‘some ...”