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“... contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British ...”

“... Westminster. At school they trotted out elegiacs for the vanity volumes printed regularly by their masters; at Oxford and Cambridge they contributed panegyrics or genethlaica to the volumes routinely churned out by the Universities whenever anyone famous died or had a child. Even the authors of these volumes had a suspicion that what they were producing was ...”

“... they undergo a long period of apprenticeship in which they are expected to satisfy their masters. They write articles followed by monographs. They ‘revise’ or ‘challenge’ accepted viewpoints (they also appear to invent ‘accepted’ viewpoints, but that is a detail). They can then graduate to other forms of historical discourse: the ...”

“... In works with titles such as The Occult Philosophy, wise men and magi like Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee outlined in general and axiomatic form the elements of a high and secret knowledge which they claimed to have inherited from the past. This is exactly what O’Keefe has accomplished for his own misty past, instead of Orpheus, Hermes and Simon Magus, we ...”

“... absorb the poisons and the victims would then be reprieved, purified. Tituba and her husband, John Indian, also owned by Parris, prepared the witchcake under the supervision of a neighbour, who provided the recipe. Later, under questioning, Tituba said she had learned the recipe from ‘her mistress in Barbados’. In spite of their ancillary ...”

“... jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”

“... of Communism had in common with the same period of capitalism was a rejection of the rights of the masters. ‘Thank you very much, good bye,’ I said loudly to the manager as we left, trying to deepen the shame of my companions. ‘Goodbye, thank you,’ she said, with the same firm dignity, a doughty guardian of her awful cuisine. I remembered my mother’s ...”

“... Is Esports opens, when xPeke pulled off a dazzlingly innovative move to win the 2013 Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice for his League team, Fnatic; or the time the fighting game legend Daigo ‘The Beast’ Umehara pulled off 15 consecutive blocks in a row to defeat Justin Wong in the semi-final of a 2004 Street Fighter 3 ...”

“... agenda tied to its tail, one which was destructive of social solidarities, while the right-wing John Redwood objected that it came veined with social-democratic notions which discouraged governments like Britain’s from making up their minds to be independent nation states in charge of their own economy and their own politics. The different styles of ...”

“... Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment ...”

“... like Kenyatta; he preached national unity (as they all did). One who hoped much from him was John Githongo, the hero of Wrong’s fascinating, richly researched and important new book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower. Githongo believed Kibaki when he proclaimed an end to corruption, and became his right-hand man in the task of ...”

“... Biographies​ of artists often read like legends of heroes. Vasari preferred his Renaissance masters to be precocious in talent, humble in origin and, if possible, anointed by a predecessor – so he gives us Cimabue discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World War, into the Royal Academy of Art ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”