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“... was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the reader who is reading ...”

“... of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the ...”

“... Plays, paintings (famously Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey), new editions of John Lingard’s revisionist History of England, as well as Pugin’s architectural manifesto Contrasts, all treated it as the determining event in national history. The facts were fiercely argued and at a popular level there was much debate about whether or not ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... between American moral enforcers and the Third Reich. Only two low-budget independent features – Cornelius Vanderbilt’s quasi-documentary Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934) and the exploitation docudrama I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936) – escaped the net. The producer of I Was a Captive managed this by presenting the finished film for ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...”

“... exploited by Michael Moorcock in fables of sword and sorcery, the reality-collages of the Jerry Cornelius saga, the dark shadows of the Pyatt quartet. But the salutation at the start of this new epic is unexpected: ‘pard’. Moorcock, in high Victorian conceit, likes to get the story rolling by speaking directly, as writer and performer, to his ...”

“... conceptualised witchcraft as a conspiracy against an established monotheistic religion. Pope John XXII (1249-1334) was an enthusiastic enemy of witches and magicians, and his actions against them – issuing injunctions, launching investigations, executing malefactors – caused reverberations as far away as Ireland. There, Petronilla de Meath ended up ...”

“... that he does. Who? ‘The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! … Um, Hélène Cixous!’ Bayard writes these names down in his notebook, but they’re no more help than what he’s told by Foucault, to whom he pays a visit at the Collège de France. ‘The big baldy’, who seems unaccountably ...”

“... fighting in Italy had it easy: they were, according to a popular song, ‘The D-Day Dodgers’. Cornelius Ryan’s book The Longest Day (1959) and the movie it inspired, and since then Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers, fixed Normandy as the prologue to a dominant narrative that unfolds like a quest, destined to end in Berlin. It was ...”

“... pretence must be diabolic. ‘Whatever holds down and confines the senses to the earth,’ John Calvin wrote, ‘is contrary to the covenant of God.’ Calvin’s Swiss contemporary Heinrich Bullinger inveighed against miracles as requiring ‘the help of witchcraft’.Aided by statements such as these, zealous Protestants forced distinctions between ...”

“... hailed as a ‘picture of the century’; it toured widely in Britain and the US, and thanks to Cornelius Vanderbilt, it now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. ‘Ploughing in the Nivernais’ (1849) Bonheur was a new kind of celebrity. ‘Life had taught her self-reliance,’ Hewitt writes, ‘and accepting, even flaunting, her own idiosyncrasies had ...”

“... in a catalogue of magic, De Occulta Philosophia, compiled by the Hermetic philosopher Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. Automata are listed as a type of ‘celestial magic’, a category which includes maths, music, astronomy and mechanics. Study these arts in combination, Agrippa writes, and your knowledge will allow you to create spectacles of ...”

“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”