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“... bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life ...”

“... He was mad, but he was not just mad. There is more to know. This is the historical lacuna that Richard Noll exploits in his disturbing and often illuminating book. Noll comes to the quest for the historical Jung – his phrase – with a broad background in Jungianism, psychiatry and shamanism and his training stands him ...”

“... so much of Britten’s most powerful music is associated with texts and dramas treating the same broad area of psychological concern. A pattern establishes itself, and patterns demand explanation. Noticing that Britten’s major operas are pre-dominantly about the abuse of children or young men by adults (and, to some extent, the seduction of adults by young ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... of absolutes in social codes, sexual mores and standards of beauty. The ‘sable Africans’, Richard Payne Knight wrote in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste of 1805, citing the testimony of several travellers, not only admire broad flat noses and woolly hair, but view with ‘pity and contempt the ...”

“... American life stand various forms of reticence. Clarke occasionally records protests by Orwell and Richard Hoggart against the Americanisation of popular culture, but he does not discuss their significance, even though anti-Americanism was not confined to the cultural pundits. Thus we have the curious fact that, on the face of it, the Americans who came to ...”

“... the work of writers like William Blisset and Herbert Knust. I would have added John DiGaetani’s Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, which was published four years earlier, but Martin claims that a book of that title ‘by Bernard di Gaetani’ was ‘under preparation at the time of writing’. The chapter on Yeats is a tissue of fancies (Lady ...”

“... in 1944 with a daring left hook to Berlin or the Ruhr rather than move all the forces forward on a broad front – which was what happened. The military problem was complicated politically by the fact that the left hook would have involved placing all the emphasis – and the allocation of supplies, which, as controlled by the Supreme Commander, were the real ...”

“... distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?’ The old philosophers thought not, but Richard Gregory and subsequent workers have told more complex stories about recovery from blindness. We do not need philosophers to become engrossed. The one non-spiritual goal of Christ’s ministry was the curing of blindness, and every evangelist describes ...”

“... mean. This went with a strong desire – in theory at least – to take military action against a broad range of countries across the world. Two things were particularly striking here: a tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies, and a difficulty verging on autism when it came to international opinions that didn’t coincide with their own – a ...”

“... a fraction of the fraudulent stuff then on the market – was burned at the Excise Office Yard off Broad Street. Newspapers reported that ‘the city for nearly half a mile round was scented by the smell arising from the burning piles of sloe and other leaves forming the British tea.’ The ongoing scandal of what was really in British tea made space for ...”

“... what about the name of the ferry boat? The Duchess M, trundling backwards and forwards across the broad river, between the bustling international container port of Tilbury and Gravesend, the historic sump of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, feels like a subliminal tribute to Thatcher: little visited now, but with persisting memories of the days when she was ...”

“... his biographers in dismissing them in a page or two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerisingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the ...”

“... were carefully adapted to the particular interests of their recipients. Some derive from the broad humour of the early Tudor poet and playwright John Heywood, whom Harington greatly admired, but the most spry anticipate the sharpness of Ben Jonson, which is probably why Jonson was keen to dismiss them in conversation with William Drummond as ‘but ...”

“... At any rate, there is a very strenuous blend of women-envy in some of the magazines for men. Richard Wollheim has just finished telling us, in ‘Germs’, his frighteningly good memoir extracted in these pages, about wanting to be a woman sixty years ago. ‘I knew that what I wanted,’ he wrote, ‘was, not so much to have her, though I also wanted ...”