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“... no difficulty imagining that I was imprisoned with my ladies-in-waiting in a damp castle in the North of England, depressed and stripped of all my power, with only memories to treasure. Unlike Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.Since her death in 1587, Mary Stuart has caused strange stirrings and vehement imaginings in those ...”

“... far overtakes mimesis; or, later, in the unformed mounds of fat slapped down in front of us by Joseph Beuys. But Ulysses is where the process fully plays itself out, whirring and clunking and splatting and squelching. Ulysses matters most, because it makes matter of everything. Everything in Ulysses is déclassé, or (to use a term of ...”

“... the country opposition to support – both as MP and as office-holder – for the ministry of Lord North. Womersley sees this as a move away from Whiggism; I see it as a move from Toryism to the kind of Whiggism which it suited alienated Whigs to stigmatise as Tory. Gibbon quotes Burke to this effect, and it is interesting that he enjoyed the company of ...”

“... indications of cultural decline. As the nation went, it has been said, so did its literature. The North American critic Hugh Kenner’s recent book on this topic was uncharitably entitled A Sinking Island. John Patten’s recent appropriation of F.R. Leavis’s concept of the ‘great tradition’ is, needless to say, full of ironies. Leavis was certainly ...”

“... contrast) with Christian counterparts: Sabbatai’s father and mother, Mordecai and Clara, with Joseph and Mary; his harlot-wife, Sarah, with Mary Magdalen; his homosexual lover and 12th apostle, Saul, with Judas; the Vizier and Sultan with Pilate. For the reader, the recurrent awareness of one story slumbering inside another curiously disturbs the temporal ...”

“... also places the journey in the context of the great Pacific explorations of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, and not just because they were personally known to Boswell and Johnson on the London celebrity circuit. Just as Cook and his crew scoured the Pacific islands with scientific and anthropological as well as colonial intent so, Rogers argues, Johnson ...”

“... include both the Virgin and Christopher. It also explains why in many polyptychs, especially in North Italy, the Virgin is painted holding the child in the main panel, while the dead Christ is shown in another panel above. The changes that Steinberg describes in the representation of the child must therefore be understood as reflections of changing ...”

“... this year all the trade, literary and political figures present at the opening in Budapest travel north on the following day to the coalmining town of Salgotarjan. A crowd has gathered outside the arts centre; there are speeches, poetry, a choir performance and a band playing Country and Western, with Hungarian lyrics. It is raining again, but the crowd is ...”

“... one can suppose, run foul of that opinionated, jealous and vindictive theorist of language, Joseph Stalin. In this country, whatever future lay open for Saussure early on was blighted by the remarks made about him by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, where he is dead and buried by page six, charged with having ‘concocted’ the ...”

“... spoke in an accent of his own devising, a blend of his mother’s Tidewater drawl and an ancient North-East boarding-school dialect; depending on the listener’s predisposition, during his readings he would sound either affected and bratty or elevated, even Orphic, especially when speaking of or for the dead. Although he was one of the most philosophical ...”

“... civilian cars slowed down to watch, and in full view of apartment houses. As the police novelist Joseph Wambaugh put it, this was not brutalisation, it was street theatre. Finally, after at least two minutes of beating, electrocution, kicks and, as he claimed, ‘racial slurs’, King was handcuffed and bundled into a police cruiser. On their way home the ...”

“... confidently say what tone they themselves would have adopted. But even twenty years later, when Joseph Heller’s ‘unedifying tale’ of the Italian campaign, Catch-22, first appeared, the TLS thought it helpful to warn that there is ‘no shadow of nobility’ in Yossarian’s behaviour, as if this were something the author might have wanted to correct ...”

“... meant providing the scenario and captions for silent pictures). Mank’s younger brother, Joseph, followed four years later, also on a Paramount contract, and went on to write and direct movies including A Letter to Three Wives and All about Eve, which won him two Oscars. Mank’s own career wasn’t quite so dazzling, but his work on the screenplay ...”

“... his public hazing and was made an earl. British scholars who had accompanied Macartney, among them Joseph Banks and John Barrow, published huge amounts of information on China’s flora, fauna, agriculture, music, language and customs. The memoirs of the entourage introduced the word that would become ‘kowtow’ to the English language. Nobody thought ...”

“... Britain, because it deterred the German surface fleet from further attempts to break out of the North Sea and attack Britain’s Atlantic supply lines. But the German submarine fleet suffered no such inhibitions, wreaking havoc on unescorted merchant ships and bringing Britain to the brink of starvation and defeat. An honest review of the record casts the ...”