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“... a distortion to prove a point. Aztec children were rarely sacrificed and only in times of drought. Young male adults were the usual victims. Of course there is something comical in the earnest lilt of the last two sentences, but the ridicule of the columnists was more sinister, a foretaste of how they will try, as the saying goes, to take out pockets of ...”

“... wonder of our stage!’ His climactic description was elaborated in the Second Folio (1632) by the young John Milton: ‘Thou, in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a lasting monument.’ Historically, Shakespeare criticism begins with wonder, and that it should have returned there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of ...”

“... Shortly after the end of World War Two, a young American professor submitted an article to a leading philosophical journal, explaining a difficult point in one of Spinoza’s arguments. In short order he received his manuscript back with the news, written on it by hand, that ‘we are not now and never will be interested in Spinoza ...”

“... distinctness. My mother heard Greek spoken in the homes of certain family members when she was a young girl. I did not, but I remember how foreign these ancient cousins and aunts appeared to me, how cluttered their small, dark apartments were with furniture, their walls covered with Turkish carpets, icons or paintings of bearded priests and plump-looking men ...”

“... now revised his translation. The provisional title referred to the lifespan of Jaromil, who dies young, as lyric poets will, but also to the enforced, mass-produced, writer-proclaimed revolutionary ardours which ensued in 1948. At the outset, Jaromil’s lyricism is a Modern affair in which biological compulsion and biographical reference – peeps at the ...”

“... as an entrance into imagining and longing and learning. In her teens she belonged in a set of keen young readers and writers, girls and boys – they shared around Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept ...”

“... that has gone, it’s the me who knew it who is disappearing. Those who are older than they are young make exaggeratedly impatient, self-deprecating jokes when they forget a name, a face or why it was they walked into a room. (Recent research from Notre Dame suggests that it may be passing through doorways which unframes the thought you had the second ...”

“... has been at the forefront of the scene since the 1990s. He is the first Asian writer to receive a Hugo award (in 2015), and the author whose work best captures the giddying, libidinous pace of the Chinese economic boom. His monumental Three-Body Trilogy – first published between 2006 and 2010, and recently translated into English by Ken Liu, a ...”

“... there would be a majority for the ‘yes’ campaign, which was led by the popular and charismatic Hugo Chávez, the former Army colonel who had been elected President a year earlier. The only question was the size of the turnout, which might be affected by bad weather. Venezuelans had already been called out to vote five times since November 1998, and even in ...”

“... who do-anything, sell-anything, eat-anything … the sad ones, the saddest in the world’. The young commander’s words were greeted with astonishment. Villalobos was one of the war’s heroes: he was charismatic, adored by his troops, a strategist of legendary brilliance. But among the mistakes he was acknowledging was his role in the murder of Roque ...”

“... College in the same year, Lewis was soon enjoying meetings of the Wee Teas, a dining club of young academics who liked talking philosophy. Next there was the Martlets, a literary society whose members read their stories to one another. Tolkien and Lewis finally met in 1926 and duly formed a club called the Cave for members of the Oxford English School ...”

“... Zola was fully conscious of his role as public intellectual, citing the precedent of Victor Hugo: ‘If such an odious deed had been done in Hugo’s time, he would have thundered with the voice of justice and defended the people’s rights.’ Zola, too, thunders, passionately, magisterially, amid the clamour of the ...”

“... claim that the revolution avoided personality cults, Havana is full of billboards showing Che, Hugo Chávez and, above all, El Comandante – my favourite has him dressed in full olive drab regalia, gazing out benevolently, saying ‘vamos bien.’ But is Cuba doing well? Kapcia is right to say that the ‘sheer fact of survival’ is a remarkable ...”

“... remarried. Instead she moved back to Trogen, her birthplace, and designed a new house for her young family; supervising its construction, planting and tending its garden, and looking after a series of paying guests. She taught her two daughters to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, quilt and make lace. In her spare time, such as it was, she learned ...”

“... Joseph became king of Naples in 1806. Renamed the Royal Africans and briefly commanded by Joseph Hugo, father of Victor, they fought Calabrian guerrillas before joining Napoleon’s campaigns in Germany and Russia. A strange and bitter journey, which took men from Africa to the Caribbean, to France, to Italy, and then to the retreat from Moscow in 1812, each ...”