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“... Scott Atran’s book about jihad and the wilder fringes of Islam is ambitious, noisy, scuffed at the edges. The Maghreb, Palestine, Syria, Kashmir, Indonesia: Atran has been there, brought home the findings and done his best to explain what turns people into suicide bombers and jihadis in Muslim countries, where mostly they are tiny slivers of the population, and non-Muslim countries, where they are rarer still ...”

“... newly established charter schools were managed by for-profit companies. One such edubusiness, the Richard Milburn Academy, has been forced to close seven failing schools across the state since 2006, but is still allowed to operate two campuses in Daytona Beach with $2.8 million in tax subsidies. In all, 30 per cent of the state’s charter schools have gone ...”

“... during the Thirties; each was an important art-collector. But there the resemblance ends. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (1879-1953), Duke of Westminster – called Bend’Or from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary ...”

“... The instruments of expansion were heavily-armed horsemen, castles and siege-engines (‘Walter Scott and Hollywood had it right’). Cavalrymen were dressed in iron at a time when iron had up to fifty times the value relative to what it has today, a ‘staggering investment’ indeed. The overall story is of a ‘dramatic reversal of the pattern of ...”

“... of reprints – The Fourteen-Eighteen collection – edited by an antiquarian bookseller, Peter T. Scott. Adams was a product of Malvern and Cambridge, and a lieutenant in the same battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as Sassoon and Graves. His title is ironic: ‘nothing of importance’ was the official description of an ordinary day of trench warfare ...”

“... narrative shows how and when some one-sided readings of Frankenstein gained on all others. Richard Brinsley Peake’s adaptation, Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, was staged in 1823. Mary Shelley was not consulted and not impressed. Among other defects, the drama reinterpreted the novel along confident ideological lines, spelt out in an ...”

“... members also included Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, Thomas Day, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. William Hutton was also in touch with the ‘Lunatics’ and hence not merely with advanced scientific, religious, educational and political ideas but with a new sense of the shifting balance of social and cultural power in late ...”

“... are also more likely to pull in the punters. If literary works forget to mention the clitoris, as Scott and Thackeray unaccountably do, you can always put them right. Hence the current practice of rewriting the classics so as to make them more ‘accessible’, adding a touch of cleavage to Emma Woodhouse or dash of zoophilia to Mr Knightley. Novels whose ...”

“... followed years of apparent failure. Or so the story goes. Welles, like his fellow Midwesterner Scott Fitzgerald, had no second act. The most lavishly gifted American film-maker of his generation became a Promethean figure, the outsize artistic temperament laid low, by Hollywood or perhaps by his own character. The intractable nature of character was a ...”

“... for all of life before Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh ...”

“... is structured around discussions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright). All the same, it ‘opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical black intellectual past’, Robinson explained in an interview in 2013. ‘As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the terms that he ...”

“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... of oppression, are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old Story (1822), neatly describing the emotional dynamic by which narratives about Mary Queen of Scots, such as this historical romance itself, could be used to serve the ...”

“... ballad-mongers and historians combined to give him his unsupported date in the time of King Richard’s exile, his wholly bogus aristocratic status as a dispossessed heir to the earldom of Huntingdon, and, somewhat incongruously, a greatly enlarged corpus of unashamedly plebeian opponents with an ever-increasing tendency to improve on the potter’s ...”

“... questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the ...”