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“... and Lane Fox aptly reminds us of the incident in the Acts of the Apostles when Barnabas and Paul are mistaken for Zeus and Hermes. Often seeing and hearing were combined in the oracular centres where consultation of the god, most frequently Apollo, might be preceded by incubation and fasting and lamp-lit ceremonies. The gods were consulted on a great ...”

“... groove with an immeasurable distance between them, but on parallel lines.’ A similar impulse lay behind the rise of the religious movement known as ‘Ethiopianism’. The term was first used formally by a South African ex-Wesleyan minister called Mangena Mokone, who founded his Ethiopian Church in 1892. To African Christians throughout sub-Saharan ...”

“... she asserts, both sexes worked in embroidery workshops. These centres produced goods for rich lay people and elaborate vestments for the Church. The organisation of such businesses seems to have been mostly in male hands, but there is evidence of one female entrepreneur, Mabel of Bury St Edmunds, who worked on orders from Henry III. There is also evidence ...”

“... forces, his family’s ardent and historically-conditioned desire for a cultural investment, Jean-Paul is remorselessly channelled towards words and writerdom. It is as sustained a demonstration, pursued with unflagging rigour, of a writer being ‘made’ as Conrad’s is of a writer making himself; and the contrast of the one’s savage repudiating irony ...”

“... petitioning for access to the Oval Office to a man who himself had no access.’ The difficulty lay in part in Haig’s temperament. Because he had built his reputation in staff jobs it was assumed that he would make a good team player. But he was not a comfortable person to be with. According to one writer, he brought a ‘ferocious intensity’ to each ...”

“... state for Northern Ireland, Willie Whitelaw, in the grand Cheyne Walk home of his junior minister, Paul Channon. Unsurprisingly, it did not go well, and not just because of ideological differences, or the class gulf between toffs and scruffs. For a start, the hardline Mac Stiofáin had excluded from his team the flexible and imaginative Ó Brádaigh, the ...”

“... and a convent education gave her a strong desire to explore ‘the whole sinful world that lay before me’ when she left school. Her first enthusiasm was for the theatre. After she left school, at 17, she worked in a repertory company as an assistant stage manager, then went for an audition at Rada but ‘was struck dumb, and rushed out, silently ...”

“... involved? I guess its most attractive meaning is something like: ‘I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for a Bill of Rights that may have this implication.’ A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say ...”

“... for low life’, and we can be fairly certain he contracted syphilis there. The Treponema lay low in him until 1910, when he had a severe bilious attack and developed headaches and back pain, severe enough for him to stay in sanatoria in Dresden and Wiesbaden. Over the next decade he developed numbness in his hands and blurred vision, and in the early ...”

“... spoke truth to power and sacrificed his career in consequence. The record – Rumsfeld is happy to lay it out in detail – shows that Shinseki cautiously observed in a Senate hearing just a month before the war that ‘several hundred thousand’ troops might be required as an occupation force. Quizzed by journalists, Rumsfeld issued a furious rebuttal, but ...”

“... in exotic locales, not all of which would win the approval of the post-colonial critic: ‘Tringia lay at my feet, dissolved in peaceful slumber, dreaming no doubt that he was in his native shades of Chili gathering rich wild grapes clustered on every vine, or sporting with his hairy brethren among the old umbrage.’ Since Tringia can gather grapes, one ...”

“... Harold Acton and John Lehmann, were Old Etonians. The first million-selling paperback was Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters in 1956, while Kingsley Amis received £100 for Lucky Jim. There is a wonderful description by a friend of Virginia Woolf’s who arrived at her flat to find Woolf and Edith Sitwell, between whom relations were somewhat ...”

“... Enlightenment waged their wars against superstition and l’infâme. The Republic of Letters–as Paul Hazard argued long ago in a classic book – provided the stage on which the crisis of the modern European mind was enacted. Goldgar seeks to map this imaginary state, offering precise surveys of its borders and colourful sketches of its local topographies ...”

“... whose sailors got drunk in port and injured people in fights. But it was difficult for navies to lay down the law in the ocean expanse until the development of better naval weaponry. Bosco implies that ships had a limited ability to engage one another at sea until the end of the Age of Sail. This underestimates the trireme ram, Korea’s armoured Geobukseon ...”

“... no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation. Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been ...”