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“... and legitimation for the new regime.It was essentially this edition which was translated by Richard Wilhelm into German in the early part of this century. Wilhelm downplayed or overlaid the Confucian moralising; he emphasised a spirituality derived from its being in touch with ‘timeless wisdom’. This is preserved by Wilhelm’s ...”

“... of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English literature.’ Peter Fuller did at times write with wit and brilliance, but what he was restoring art criticism to was Eng Lit rather than literature. By Eng Lit I mean that puritan and parochial academic tradition of which Leavis was the major school ...”

“... Charles I’s execution in 1649. It remains one of the most memorable and terrifying scenes in English history. Eight months later, Cromwell became Lord Protector. Under the Instrument of Government, devised mostly by John Lambert, his mercurial but talented associate, he ruled until his death in September 1658, assisted by a Council of State, in theory ...”

“... reply did for More what he had already done for some and was still to do for others of his English friends: it presented him to the learned Europe of his day. Erasmus’s share in the fashioning of his contemporaries’ – and of our – picture of the Henrician Renaissance is incalculably large. Mountjoy, his patron, might write to summon him to ...”

“... less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive power – though, aiming for ‘a very English absolutism’ they can look as insular in Mendle’s account as they do in Pocock’s. Pocock has retained his interest in the Civil Wars, particularly in their British dimension, but has ranged far beyond them. One hero of The Ancient Constitution was ...”

“... coloured by an invalid’s intensity of feeling. Once tasted, its flavour is not forgotten. The English village and the Coming-Out Ball are well-worn sets in the scene loft of the English novel. The country house is another. In Max Egremont’s novel Cragham Castle is not a glamorous backdrop: and even its decay is not ...”

“... sold off, Friedrich was left with a strong desire to produce steel and steel products ‘in the English manner’, combining toughness and malleability. Friedrich squandered his grandmother’s inheritance in pursuit of his obsession. He experimented with different raw materials, different locations and different techniques. Debts piled up; he was crossed ...”

“... According to the English statute of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason ...”

“... Bertrand du Guesclin, the Breton adventurer who led a mixed host of French, Gascon and English free soldiers into Castile to destool King Pedro the Cruel in favour of his bastard brother Henry, rose ultimately to be constable of France. A good many English captains made considerable names for themselves in France ...”

“... about? I deliberately called my work a ‘life’ of Orwell because, as I argued in the book, English ‘biography’, since the time of Dr Johnson, has come to imply the portrait of a character. The main business of a biographer has often been thought to be that of ‘getting inside’ his subject, ‘grasping the inwardness’, ‘revealing the true ...”

“... A socially adverse public record is, on the whole, advantageous. The more felonious associates of Richard Nixon were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering ...”

“... so as to place her works ‘alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra’. What else to expect from curators capable of insisting that the true home of modern art was St Ives or Yorkshire? ‘Pretending that it was is complacent, insular and either intellectually dishonest or genuinely stupid.’ How dishonest are ...”

“... the local guides if people ever came here to commit suicide. The young woman, who spoke flawless English, appeared baffled. I rephrased the question. She still didn’t understand. ‘Does anyone ever jump off here?’ I repeated. ‘To kill themselves.’ She looked at me with a frowning smile, as if at a wilfully obtuse child. ‘But why would anyone ever ...”

“... Every country has its social obsession, and class is undoubtedly the British, or at any rate English, obsession. It is, to be sure, more amusing than some others. When Franz Josef Strauss recently argued that the Nazis had, after all, been ‘National Socialists’ and were therefore closer to the Social Democrats than to him, his extraordinary invective backfired, but the intensity of the public debate that followed showed that the subject was close to an understandable, and deadly serious, German obsession ...”

“... years since a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one ...”