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“... harder edges of Thatchersim have been rubbed into a certain fubsiness by a ‘kinder, gentler’ John Major. What seems to be gathering power among the middle and professional classes is a new republicanism, a desire for a complete political representation of the Whig dream. This was Margaret Thatcher’s dream also, and why she cried (when given the ...”

“... the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, demanded an alternative to the Treasury plan, Lt-Col Murray Bernays, a legal officer in the Personnel Division charged with collecting evidence of war crimes against US servicemen, was found to have been studying the problem since July – as best I can make out from Conot, as an act of bureaucratic free enterprise ...”

“... origins. It was published by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine under Byron’s name. John William Polidori, Byron’s former physician, claimed it as his own and threatened a lawsuit to recover the rights to it; Byron disclaimed authorship. The magazine promised to correct its error and to compensate Polidori, but the correction was botched and ...”

“... really ‘the pre-Christian solar symbol associated with the magic number four’. The feast of John the Baptist was always only that of the summer solstice ‘and of pagan baptism’. Christianity, Camporesi claims, was forced on the countryside by the town, through the vicious ministries of the town’s minions, the Church hierarchy. But the brave ...”

“... the similarities end. The route from the generation of double acts that preceded them, comics like Murray and Mooney and Sid Field and Jerry Desmonde, through their near-contemporaries, Jewel and Warriss and Mike and Bernie Winters, to their successors, Cannon and Ball and Little and Large, is undeviating in its reliance on the sparring partnership of an ...”

“... to make prudential changes in his manuscripts, and left the rest in the hands of the publisher Murray and his advisers: ‘Ask Mr Gifford and Mr Hobhouse, and, as they think, so let it be.’ To some extent this kind of interference, sanctioned as it was, justifies talk about replacing the author with Foucault’s ‘author-function’, a term designed to ...”

“... censored and distorted, to a degree that significantly changed their direction, by the publisher Murray. Coleridge himself went on editorialising and re-interpreting ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which supplies McGann’s most intricate and fascinating example: ‘The Ancient Mariner’ becomes itself an elaborate commentary upon literary transmission, and a ...”

“... a taste for highly creative writing should seek out A.E. Housman: New Poems [sic] ed. [sic] by John Edmunds, with a preface and notes by Hilary Bacon (San Francisco, 1985). Every word, bracket and comma here is so entirely to the point that it is virtually a prose-poem in the genre that Housman made his own: the almost deadpan burlesque of poor ...”

“... tracks healing the torn paper’. But the poem has a good story to tell – about the visit of Dr Murray to one of his OED contributors, whose home turns out to be Broadmoor – and tells it with chilling assurance, not least in the pacing and line-breaks. Reynolds is learned and laconic and his mind leaps about a bit, a combination which makes some of his ...”

“... as a nationalist alternative. Nothing exemplified the new political culture more tellingly than John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), which the 7:84 theatre company took on tour round Scotland. The play itself was impeccably socialist; but audiences were more alert to its unintended nationalist message. Indeed, there ...”

“... the history of witch beliefs and witch trials, however, first took shape in opposition to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which claimed that Renaissance witches were worshippers of pagan gods. It has therefore been resolutely agnostic about the existence of actual witches in the period of the great witch-hunt. Even Deborah ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... him when necessary. For another, his writing has never been fully at home in the tropics. Les Murray, a comparably prolific user of English under a hot sun, made his poem ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’ into a love song to comfort clothing (‘scunge’), and Walcott likes to wear that kind of thing, but he’s one of the least holidayish of ...”

“... by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold. That same ...”

“... more august colleagues liked him. ‘A delightful and kindly companion of the road’ was the way Murray Kempton, an inveterate connoisseur of rogues, described him. Sparks left his family behind – he missed his father’s funeral – and, for all his surface conviviality, he shunned close ties of any kind, never marrying and working largely by ...”