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“... ordinary. A fellow Huguenot, wearing a blond wig, a black suit with a damask vest and a hat with a rose on it, stood before the house and addressed him, first in English and then in French. He identified himself as Jean Le Clerc, the celebrated philologist and theologian from Holland who had edited the complete Latin works of Erasmus, produced a widely read ...”

“... provocative tract for the times, a way of back-projecting the modern dilemma – so well stated by Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man – of how to create a ‘public space defined by the public dignity of embodied individuals’. To rescue our past, we must resurrect the body, all too long hidden from history; and this must be done, not least ...”

“... added to it, to blend the scribbling madman with the rutting faun and the soaring spectre of the rose. So far as we know there were no films made of Nijinsky dancing, and we have to rely on descriptions, posed photographs, some snapshots, drawings and sketches, and the legend. But the legend itself, now that Romola and the others with the living memory are ...”

“... Joyce, say, through Henry Green and Beckett and Robbe-Grillet to Burroughs and Christine Brooke-Rose. The dust jacket flaps of novels published by Calder and Boyars between 1966 and 1972 list their books under the varying heads of ‘Contemporary Fiction’, ‘Fiction’, ‘Modern Fiction’; unusually, on the jacket flap of Quin’s Tripticks (1972) the ...”

“... fields Rise and enlarge their suburbs. In Bage’s lifetime, the population of Birmingham rose from 15,000 to 70,000. The ironworks in which he had an interest may have failed but with his involvement Bage had taken a stake in the future. Older attitudes lingered, however. A reviewer of Joseph Priestley’s Memoirs claimed in 1806 that ‘there is ...”

“... war he kept getting sick or wounded on the eve of great battles that decimated his regiment, and rose to the Labour leadership because most of the obvious contenders had lost their seats in the National Government landslide of 1931. Apart from sheer luck, what changed matters was his ascension to the rank of major in the war and the postwar Labour tide that ...”

“... a book to set beside W.C. Jordan’s Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard’s Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). Jordan remains invaluable on Louis’s administrative reforms, and Richard on the intricacies of French dynastic politics, but Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the ...”

“... Miltown was no better than a placebo. A more elegant study to the same effect was published by Richard Gracely and his colleagues in 1985. Gracely purported to be studying a pain reliever called fentanyl in patients recovering after having their wisdom teeth removed. But he was more interested in whether a clinician’s attitude relieved pain. So he ...”

“... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...”

“... at an increasingly hostile Asia and dangerous Europe. Finding it impossible to hold out, Hull ‘rose to the occasion magnificently’, an observer wrote, announcing that the United States would henceforth ‘shun and reject’ the ‘so-called right-of-conquest … The New Deal indeed would be an empty boast if it did not mean that.’ Latin American ...”

“... Libels, a particularly dispiriting demonstration of prejudice at work.* Edith Swan and Rose Gooding were neighbours who quarrelled, a disagreement which began in 1920 and led to a spate of abusive letters, most of them sent to Swan. In 1921, Swan launched a private prosecution for criminal libel against Gooding. Despite the lack of solid ...”

“... his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose through the ranks to become precentor, and spent his dotage working on the cathedral’s medieval manuscripts.In the course of his research, Bannister struck up a correspondence with Montague Rhodes James. Though he is now more famous for his ghost ...”

“... on the picture reads ‘MANIFEST DESTINY ONWARD TO MARS’, denouncing the hubris of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, with their desire to colonise the sky above us, other planets, space itself. Smith’s dislodged landmass is almost awash in coastal flooding: entire states (Texas, Florida, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts) and swathes of the ...”

“... the hands of the population of Canterbury, and his readiness to anticipate betrayal by the English rose he becomes attached to, a nurse called Catherine, are not signs of paranoia: for Daud is a black Muslim from Tanzania, and most of the white locals are either patronising or unforthcoming or directly hostile about ‘coons and wogs and smelly niggers’. The ...”

“... Carew addressed to his beloved: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your Beauty’s orient deep, These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Appropriate in its strange way: Carew’s essence of beauty is the opposite of what lives in the work of dunces, and yet Carew’s sense of wonder is to linger on in Pope’s ...”