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“... it appears in the same author’s History of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (now available in English translation). But in the main this is an approachable and thought-provoking book for anyone with an interest in and some knowledge of the Crusades. The essential problem of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the lesser principalities of ‘Outremer’ was a ...”

“... work of academics. One such man is Ian Buruma. Educated in the Netherlands but writing in English, Buruma is known for his work on the Far Eastern Economic Review and in the New York Times, and as the author of A Japanese Mirror, a racy book on the Japanese underworld. God’s Dust, too, is somewhat breathlessly written as he moves us from Burma to ...”

“... stay. It’s mouth-watering to read, and it would be really sad to cut, a Wodehouse country-house English breakfast: ‘silver dishes warmed by little flames, smiling from the sideboard’, scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, fish and kedgeree. And, in this case, a large, pristine ham is waiting to be sliced. One of Duff & Trotter’s Paramount hams. (What a ...”

“... Informaçam das terras do Preste Joam das Indias, published in Lisbon in 1540, is available in English as The Prester John of the Indies (1954). It remains to this day indispensable for any understanding of medieval Ethiopia, containing descriptions of the ancient capital Aksum, with its obelisks, and the monolithic rock-hewn churches of Lalibala, as well ...”

“... detained: the shipper was Henri de Monfreid, whose memoir La Croisière du Hachich (1935) – in English translation, Hashish: A Traveller’s Tale (1994) – is a splendid introduction to the subject of trafficking and drugs regulations. The Home Office was consulted before Monfreid’s shipment was allowed to proceed. Shortly afterwards, two waiters, one ...”

“... catches a glimpse of Frau Lola, pleasuring herself in anticipation of a visit from Salkia, or the English tennis star, or, God forbid, Harpo. But no, it is Tadzio, lovely Tadzio, Who neither blushes nor even seems taken aback. – Möchtest du Pussy essen? she asks in a childish voice           – Smeckt gut . . . But the boy’s German ...”

“... a short step to the triple breakthrough of 1595, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II. The combination of a learned and allusive style with the indulgent mockery of a schoolmaster who enjoys the friendly patronage of a king proclaim a writer at ease with his own educational capital and the position it may earn him. As it turned ...”

“... context. It is, nevertheless, from a work which is in some ways close in spirit to Skinner, Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories, that the most penetrating recent criticism of Warrender has come. Of the trio of Hobbes scholars I mentioned above, Oakeshott is the one whose ideas stand most in need of further development today, for he is one of the ...”

“... had inherited her lands. Caesarius of Heisterbach, a monk writing around 1230, observed that the English king (at that time Henry III, Eleanor’s grandson) was ‘said to be descended from a phantom mother’. Eleanor’s magical character might explain both Louis’s initial, passionate devotion to his queen and his later repugnance. One poet makes her ...”

“... he may very well have envisaged as a sequence, an ambitious three or four-part series drawn from English history, with Henry VI? (Until fairly recently, of course, English or British history, especially in its literary/dramatic forms, has been a story of kings.) With the exception of King John and Henry ...”

“... disappears when you look inward. The chaos within is one of the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and father, whose inner lives might offer strong ...”

“... geography and history: living on an island, free from invasion for nine centuries; having ruled an English-speaking overseas empire; surviving alone in 1940; always distrusting Continental entanglements; sharing films and TV series with America rather than the rest of Europe; learning languages badly; feeling deeply different from the French, the Germans and ...”

“... on Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, used to argue that Russell was just the latest English version of the ‘bourgeois formalism’ which Hegel had diagnosed in Kant. But nobody listened to them either, and after the discovery of the young, humanist, pragmatist Marx they, too, gave up. Just when it seemed that the dialectic which Kant began had ...”

“... Twice in my lifetime, Quebec referendums have brought the country to the verge of breaking up, and English-speaking Canadians accept that a loose, unassertive confederation is the best way of keeping the country together. Last summer, the discovery of human remains – the bodies of children who died after being removed from their parents – on the grounds of ...”

“... level with the motorway, is the interchange of the M8 and the M74, which leads eventually to the English border. The interchange is one of the city’s largest structures, and as you poke around – mostly alone – you get a sense of what a grand public project this was, how generously landscaped, if now rather neglected. Heading east underneath the ...”