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“... antithesis (New Criticism) and synthesis, and concentrates on what was happening in departments of English literature, at the expense of developments elsewhere – notably the Warburg school of cultural history (including Baxandall) and the Annales school of social history (including Chartier). Greenblatt’s essays, which take a text and recreate its context ...”

“... autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle ...”

“... later of History, at Oxford, Poet Laureate, author of the first, and once much admired, History of English Poetry – but his learning was destined to a common obscurity. From David Fairer’s lovingly edited collection of the letters written by and to him, he emerges as the all-knowing but unworldly prof, likeable as the sharp-toothed Malone could never be ...”

“... might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows ...”

“... that they call ‘hill climbing’ in the computer-learning trade (hence, I suppose, the title of Richard Dawkins’s new book). It’s guaranteed to get you where you’re going so long as the distance between is finite. (And so long as there are no insurmountable obstacles or ‘local maxima’ in the way: nothing is perfect.) Hill climbing is often the ...”

“... of tone and the sure movements of the brush are always performances worth one’s attention. The English in particular came to love him; in the 18th and 19th centuries collecting Cuyp was so much an English thing that most of his paintings which are not now in this country nevertheless spent much of their lives here. ...”

“... the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe ...”

“... mark of the Victorian age to the eve of the Second World War, the Stracheys were prominent in English life. Noted for their intellect and their boisterousness in argument, and characterised, in most cases, by long limbs and large spectacles, they struck Leonard Woolf as ‘much the most remarkable family I have ever known’. His wife, on the other ...”

“... of Shrewsbury should have given such sound pastoral advice to the founders of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams and his gang of merry chums: these old boys have shamed their old school, making it a byword. Shrewsbury, as Simon Raven notes, is now notorious for shrewishness. Grand old school-stories have furnished Raven with many quotes and ...”

“... Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves ...”

“... Descriptions​ of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His entry there considers, though judiciously rejects, his frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing ...”

“... decency but a devastating political blunder, which alienated moderate opinion and inoculated the English nation against Catholicism for ever. Marian apologists and polemicists were dismissed as uncharismatic second-raters, the regime in general as fatally unaware of the crucial importance of argument and debate in the battle for hearts and minds, and thus ...”

“... Just doing their job. There aren’t too many significant resemblances between Pynchon and Richard Powers – Powers’s imagination is deeply invested in the local and in Pynchon the local is always about to become something else – but the passage about the Line and the Good finds an interesting and no doubt unintended commentary in The Echo ...”

“... The Quattro Cento, now reissued along with it – would establish Stokes as a respected voice in English art-writing until his death forty years later. Stones of Rimini is decidedly the more compelling performance. Its opening lines step forward with a cool swagger, toying with Virgilian cadences: ‘I write of stone. I write of Italy where stone is ...”

“... Oscars) is in this sense the ideal Goldcrest film: classy, thoughtful, historical and English (even Ghandi was one of us). It had no ‘sex or gratuitous violence’, Jake Eberts says, and it appealed ‘to all age groups and audiences’. ‘In our view,’ Eberts continues, ‘it was like Gone with the Wind.’ Only ...”