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“... moved but not overwrought at the fate of those who died at Pompeii, with the sinking of the Mary Rose, during the San Francisco earthquake and at the collapse of the Tay Bridge. We respond much more uneasily to the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Estonia and the Marchioness. Lives cut short are less poignant once, to paraphrase Beckett, they ...”

“... in the following reign, Thomas Cromwell was the apotheosis (or nadir) of these ‘new men’. As Steven Gunn argues in his new book, a work of characteristic meticulousness, not only did these men encapsulate the mood, workings and functioning of Henry VII’s disorientating regime, they ‘were central … at the start and at the heart of the making of ...”

“... the encounter with Edward Penn, aged seven, muralist; Edwin’s doomed love for the sullen Rose Dorn, third-grade femme fatale; Rose’s fiery end; the improbable friendship with Arnold Hasselstrom, inarticulate playground psychopath; the romantically tortured genesis of Cartoons, complete with feverish bouts of ...”

“... over 50 per cent of science texts. Then it really took off: between 1980 and 1996, English usage rose from about 75 per cent to 91 per cent; Russian dropped from 11 per cent to 2 per cent; and German from 2.5 per cent to 1.2 per cent. Gordin canvasses several explanations for this surge. The first story concerns the decline of German. After the First World ...”

“... Red Zinger ‘tea’ is a caffeine and Camellia-free brew of peppermint, hibiscus, orange peel, rose hips, verbena, liquorice, wild cherry bark and lemongrass. Even in the 18th century, the Chinese-derived name of tea was borrowed to refer to hot-water infusions of domestic herbs, so the rising British popularity of flavoured and herbal ‘teas’ would be ...”

“... the barbarians and the city-states were entirely dependent on each other for their existence. They rose and fell together: the Huns and the Romans; the ‘Sea People’ and the Egyptians. And for the vast part of recorded history the majority of people lived in the barbarian world. Scott’s view is that the barbarian Golden Age ended as recently as four ...”

“... Roth told a publisher in 1960, ‘and that is redemption, but I haven’t the fable.’ As Steven Kellman sees things, he ‘finally found his fable’ in the writing of the Mercy of a Rude Stream books, which ended the deeply-felt ignominy of his non-productive decades ‘even as it put rest to an old man’s mortal pain.’ ‘The arc of Roth’s 89 ...”

“... wives, Charles Brandon would come near the top, second only to the king he served. The subtitle of Steven Gunn’s scholarly biography describes its subject as ‘Henry VIII’s Closest Friend’. What a prospect of damp-palmed horror that phrase evokes! The knocking of Tudor knees echoes down the years. Can a king have friends? Could Henry VIII have ...”

“... which led to his making the acquaintance of a fellow guildsman called Thomas Cromwell. Vaughan rose to a degree of professional eminence on Cromwell’s coat-tails, beginning in the years when Cromwell himself was merely a protégé of Thomas Wolsey. Together they helped Wolsey dissolve monasteries to fund his two new educational foundations at Ipswich and ...”

“... to elicit emotion. She produced music as humans would. Her fingers pressed the keys; her chest rose and fell as she apparently breathed; she bowed gracefully; she was visibly moved by the music she performed, and her audience was moved in turn. A critic who had not seen her defied ‘all the machinists on earth to make an artificial face that expresses the ...”

“... Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation ...”

“... Sancho Panza fancied himself a wine connoisseur of rare ability. Challenged on his claim to have a ‘great natural instinct in judging wines’, he assured a sceptic that you ‘have only to let me smell one and I can tell positively its country, its kind, its flavour and soundness, the changes it will undergo and everything that appertains to a wine ...”

“... of the Spanish monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious papers which he ...”

“... trend in social research that governments, and corporations, would be wise to keep track of. Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source explores the economy that has produced the ‘open source’ and ‘free software’ movements. Eric von Hippel’s Democratising Innovation looks at an economy involving a much wider range of user-supplied ...”

“... sanctions of enforced forgetfulness. That, at any rate, is the notion that drives the argument of Steven Mullaney’s new book. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare begins in the prescribed New Historicist fashion, with a telling anecdote: During the night of 10 April 1549, a procession of carts rumbled through the streets of London on a ...”