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“... punters, even fractions of a second. Fashionable theologians preached that the Creation itself was best understood as godly clockwork. The products and faith of this clockwork universe took the clockwatchers and their timepieces everywhere. In August 1773, after a 13-month voyage from Britain, the sloops Resolution and Adventure arrived on the north coast of ...”

“... in a series of calls from another of Moro’s captors, ‘Professor Niccolai’, telling Moro’s best friend, on the day he was killed, where to pick up the corpse. You hear the friend sobbing and making great efforts to speak. He is told that Moro’s last wish was that he take the news to Moro’s family. ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘You can’t,’ says ...”

“... affected Sharp’s career, nor his ability to turn out masterly reproductive engravings of the best masters of his time. Those who remarked on this found a ready explanation: the sheer monotony of the job of engraving, and the need to pore over a small piece of copper all day, meant that the mind could wander freely and would find no check to its ...”

“... promised to continue to make us leaner and fitter. The Liberal Democrat Manifesto was by far the best-written, while the Tories seem to have dumped into theirs every idea anyone in the Party ever had: my favourite was the promise on page 41 to plant a new Midlands forest. I decided not to buy the SNP Manifesto for the simple reason that it cost a fiver. Week ...”

“... birth of modern science.In his 1650 treatise on tailoring, Giovanne Pennacchini claimed that the best geometer in town was the tailor. In fact, the tailor was more than a geometer: he was both a natural and a moral philosopher, able to measure, design and understand colours in the context of the humours, the elements, metals, virtues and more. In his 1703 ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... admirable crime story spoiled. Chance, since these elaborations slacken, fatally, the tension. Geoffrey Elder is a sad drink-of-water, and Symons, quite aware of this, has taken great pains to conceal this lifeless personage behind a farrago of diaries and interviews. In vain, for the book drags more and more until we come with relief to the obligatory ...”

“... torture Bond complains of having to listen to Blofeld talk, but Waltz’s banter is about the best thing in the movie. By the end Waltz has his own version of the Blofeld scar that Donald Pleasence made famous in You Only Live Twice. The final showdown in London rings false not so much because Blofeld neither escapes to menace Bond again nor dies at ...”

“... notion, for instance, that Structuralists think there is no ‘real world’ beyond language. The best course is specific. If you think a particular book is bad and likely to be influential for that or another reason, you should take time to show its character, as James Guetti does in the current Raritan, the particular bad eminence being Terry Eagleton’s ...”

“... was the king, and the king alone, who kept England on the course he had mapped out.’ For Geoffrey Elton, by contrast, writing in the third quarter of the last century, Henry was ‘a bit of a booby and a bit of a baby’. ‘A man who marries six wives is not a man who perfectly controls his own fate.’ Like J.A. Froude, balancing the books on ...”

“... is Flaubert’s comment after Sand has been to stay with him. Writing to her, he is on his best behaviour, mild-mannered by his standards, sympathetic, confiding, envious in his low moments of her uncomplicated domesticity and innocent of the comradely bawdy and fecal tropes with which he seasons his letters to his men-friends (and one or two other ...”

“... Prayer. Despite all this, she’s now remembered as a musty mid-century artefact, an image perhaps best represented by her most visible legacy, the Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in ...”

“... of poetry is that which doesn’t own up to its politics (e.g. Larkin); and therefore that the best will proclaim its politics with pride. (The manoeuvre will be familiar to readers of contemporary literary theory.) This is clearly an inadequate conception of both literature and politics, because there can be no pristine state which poetry inhabits before ...”

“... oneself ... that one is at any rate a decent imitation of a soldier.’ Edward Brittain’s friend Geoffrey Thurlow, who described himself as ‘disgustingly windy’ and ‘no earthly use as an officer’, continued to rely on Rupert Brooke and ended his last letter to Vera in April 1917 by quoting him and saying that he would ‘like to do well for the ...”

“... 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench Division. It’s not long after Derry Irvine has made a speech ...”