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“... for the righteous. (As Star is the first to admit, scholars of Jewish and Christian apocalypse may find his texts do not always satisfy their criteria for the apocalyptic.) Apocalypse for the Greeks and Romans was not a call to prepare for a heavenly kingdom, but closer to its modern, colloquial sense and part of a broader philosophical effort to improve ...”

“... Old Testament disappeared under the powerful illumination of figurative reading. Modern readers may regard it as a historical curiosity that Augustine, reading in this fashion, should have been able, for example, to discover an adumbration of the Church in the first verses of Genesis. In his central use of Psalms, however, he needed no exercise of ingenuity ...”

“... National Guard, run at the time by that friend of America, Colonel Noriega. The Shah’s friends may have proved generally faithless, but he had shown himself to be more than equally perfidious. Having attempted to appease the anger of the Qom mullahs by imprisoning his urbane Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the Shah flew out of Tehran without bothering ...”

“... meaning and the need for interpretation are so coercively suggested at almost every moment. But we may accept them as theatrical conventions, and still find something wrong here. And the trouble isn’t in the bizarre effects they achieve, but in what these are set against: the implied norms of natural behaviour. The oddities and excesses are what we ...”

“... much venom is directed for ‘accumulated dishonesty’. If it isn’t too clear a story, this may be due in part to the subject, perhaps even to constraints arising in real life; but mainly can only be due to the language, which all along withholds more than it reveals. T. S. Eliot maintained: ‘As with Dostoevski and George Chapman, one feels that the ...”

“... children survived to adulthood; and eight were left behind when the eldest escaped to Italy with Robert Browning in 1846 (two sons, including the father’s namesake, had died six years earlier). Moulton-Barrett did not attempt to hoard girl-children only, although the legend surrounding his daughter’s elopement has sometimes suggested that. The sex of the ...”

“... S. S. Prawer is Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford. Robert Phillip Kolker is Associate Professor of Film Studies (in the Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) at the University of Maryland, College Park. But don’t let the insignia fool you. Both gentlemen, I suspect, are movie fans at heart ...”

“... out of SOE’s generosity were probably the Albanians: Hoxha’s tyranny endures to this day. It may occur to the reader, as it occurred to Lord Selborne (the last head of SOE), that SOE agents, especially those equipped with W/T sets, were admirably placed to establish a post-war intelligence network, as the Russians were doing. We do not know what ...”

“... to Seleucus in the early days of 285. He spent his remaining years as a captive. Demetrius may sound like a biographer’s dream. But he has often been dismissed as an ‘also ran’ among the big personalities of the Hellenistic era, a mercurial general whose excesses got the better of him, or as nothing more than a ‘mirror’ of his time. Pat ...”

“... undergoes an expiatory death and resurrection. As Collins observes, the Teacher of Righteousness may be associated, like Jesus, with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, although the teacher ‘is not said to offer his life as ransom for many, or to suffer vicariously on their behalf’, and there is scant evidence that he was predicted to rise from the ...”

“... a sense in which Hourani withdrew from that century. Apart from political disappointment, boredom may well have been a factor in his renunciation of active politics. ‘My boredom threshold is low,’ he was fond of remarking. So he moved from politics to political history and, later, from political to social history. He preferred to write about the 18th and ...”

“... meticulous evidence-gathering and record-keeping, and obsessive attention to detail. Trump may yet manage to escape the forces that oppose him, but his flighty and impulsive outbursts, Comey seemed to imply, are catnip to a career Bureau man. When it comes to political intrigue, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. That isn’t the case in ...”

“... godhead. Often, the searchers will carry props with them and carry out recognition tests: the boys may be shown a collection of artefacts, some of which belonged to the previous bodhisattva, and asked to pick from them. Candidates may also be marked out by physical signs, such as abnormally long earlobes – a Tibetan ...”

“... his reputation is surrounded by rumour, misinformation, disinformation. Shady and unpleasant he may have been, Nicholl says, but we owe him something – not simply because he was a great dramatist and poet, but because his death was murder, and the crime is unsolved. Nicholl is an investigator with a compelling sense of duty to the past and the people who ...”

“... Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child As the poem ...”