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“... irregular productions, anomalous beings.’ He was writing about the pig. Buffon also had a strong empirical streak. Among the many zoological puzzles confronting the Enlightenment was the migration of swallows in winter. The Greeks said that they slept in the bottom of swamps, an idea still entertained in 1779. ‘I have therefore done ...”

“... and intentions. Three biographers have lately tried their hand, in strikingly different books. Roy Jenkins’s final work is really an extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally ...”

“... even if the poem said what Dilworth says it does. Which it doesn’t. He fails to point us to the strong influence of Gill, who, like Jones, attributed nearly all modern ills to the rise of the usurious merchant class in the 15th and 16th centuries. He also believed that financiers were funding the Second World War in their own interests. Jones’s ...”

“... being in a state of nature. While the thrust of the argument may be anti-teleological, there is a strong whiff of functionalism hanging over the intellectual enterprise as a whole. The intriguing Chapter 7, devoted to the subject of ‘ethnogenesis’, develops what Scott himself calls this ‘radical constructionist’ point of view, and in so doing departs ...”

“... Johnson his special interests, which involve many darkly erudite meditations by the philosopher Roy Bhaskar. Johnson is credited with having employed a kind of analysis that permits ‘the multiple diffraction of dialectics as dialectics to accord with the complexities, angularities and nuances of our pluriversal world’. I cannot decide whether I think ...”

“... is both important and overrated. It is unjust that children’s social origins exert such a strong influence on their destinations but, in austerity Britain, the increasing numbers who grow up in poverty, or who can find only badly paid work on zero-hours contracts, face bigger problems than a lack of opportunity to ascend to a higher class. What really ...”

“... passages from Rasselas as accurate, even ‘beautiful’ (John Haslam, 1808) and ‘poignant’ (Roy Porter, 1987) illustrations of the workings of madness. The old astronomer has come to believe that, far from merely observing the weather, he is regulating it: a reason for deep anxiety since his responsibility is greater than that of any monarch, and who ...”

“... to say about Powell himself as a writer. Though he deals competently with some poets (Betjeman and Roy Fuller, Kingsley Amis and Larkin), verse isn’t really his medium. Powell responds with most certainty to those literary forms most involved with time’s randomness, its ‘miscellaneousness’: the novel, the diary, the biography. Literature is for him, to ...”

“... the Noble Pagans in Limbo. His image was enshrined, like those of Robin Hood, Louis XI and Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century, he has inspired that most typical of modern accolades, the debunking biography. Newby’s book – for the general reader, it appears – follows hard (though for the most part independently) on the remorselessly ...”

“... find him filling in some of the gaps in stories we have heard before. There is still, however, a strong reticence about details that would come naturally to any other writer (for example, we have one sentence mentioning his first marriage, and one reference to ‘my work for Britain’ in the years since the war, ‘because I preferred to do it anonymously ...”

“... so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1958. Greenblatt himself came to prefer the term ‘cultural poetics’, but by the time he said so the nominal territory had already been claimed: ‘new historicism’ it was going to be, and has been ever since in the anthologies and ...”

“... down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn. It is this curious icon which inspired Rogin’s formidable book. The Jolson who starred in Hollywood’s first feature-length partial-talkie – the movie which sounded the death knell for silent cinema – is himself a ...”

“... a natural choice for a top appointment. ‘Attilio and I go to Cyrenaica to govern there as Vice Roy and Vice Reine,’ Lilliana boasted to her father a few months after the wedding. The couple were promised a palace in Benghazi, ‘with our own stables, garage full of cars, our troops, our own torpedo boat’. As a colonial governor, Teruzzi was granted ...”

“... nationalism: ‘The discovery in mid-Meiji’ – around the turn of the 20th century – ‘of a strong affinity between Japan’s situation and that of Germany’s late modernisation led to an increasing dependence on the German example to legitimise the authoritarian heritage of the Tokugawa state while ostensibly remaining faithful to modernisation on ...”

“... but especially the yellow house, which faces the sea, are obliged to withstand the battering of strong winds blowing from the north-east. At the yellow house live Polly’s Aunt Mary and Aunt Frances, both too religious for their own good – a temperamental defect well understood by Jane Gardam: one is overtaken in the end by vagueness, the other by ...”