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“... of the law of treason by Eyre (which has recently attracted renewed ironical attention from John Barrell) which was hurled into print on the very eve of the notorious Treason Trials of 1794. The second piece is the ‘Considerations’ on the Two Acts (1795), in which Godwin seemed to come forward (anonymously) to condone legislation against popular ...”

“... Later we had other Popes who, we were told, were also jolly good, but even the warm feeling about John XXIII never approached the devotional cult around Pius XII. There was a sense of real surprise that he wasn’t beatified and canonised as soon as he died. The nuns had told us that he couldn’t officially be declared a saint while he was alive but once he ...”

“... for the occasional off-day, I cannot believe that any spirit worth his salt would challenge the laws of physics by bending tea-spoons, or would challenge the will of living human beings by telling them to fuck off and get some jazz music. We live, I know, in a changing world, but not surely a world in which the entelechy which orders the super-natural ...”

“... also looked after his father’s jobs in Cambridge, probably including the grand new chapel for St John’s College. Then, suddenly, according to Stamp, ‘some of his old Eton friends persuaded him to enter the University.’ At 24, his was a mature admission. He graduated top of the Moral Sciences Tripos for 1866. Next, he won a prize for an essay on ‘The ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... have little to do with them. They are wrong, but who can blame them? Henry Raeburn’s ‘John Johnstone, Betty Johnstone and Miss Wedderburn’ (c.1790-95). Emma Rothschild has a written a strange, immensely thoughtful book which at first glance ought to complement Devine’s work. But it does nothing of the sort, attending instead to the history ...”

“... Constitution under any conditions, that it was incapable of coming to any agreement or of creating laws, there wouldn’t have been any bloodshed. There wouldn’t have been any victims. There wouldn’t have been any moral shock, we all felt. There wouldn’t have been the schism among democratic groupings in society that threatened to escalate into a new ...”

“... that happens must also have made its representation both arduous and disappointing – the natural laws are not so easily bent on stage. Roussel paid for everything, it seems: the hire of the theatre, the cast, the effects, the sets. This first time round, the Impressions lasted only two nights, because Roussel’s mother then died and he called it off; six ...”

“... and duffing them up a bit – for instance, imagining what it would look like if a society with no laws were turned over to the free will of self-denominated geniuses. Well, someone has done that, except it isn’t a book or movie, it’s a video game. BioShock, which came out in 2007, was conceived by Ken Levine and developed by 2K Boston/2K Australia, and is ...”

“... Brecht’s work in its setting (sacrilege can come later), the starting-point still has to be John Willett’s The New Sobriety 1917-33: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period.1 This marvellously illustrated book takes us through all the bitter political and cultural history, from the aborted revolt of the returning soldiers in 1918, the killing of ...”

“... in first class, and the hopes of the dispossessed in steerage. The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and ...”

“... for cash in the recession-hit 1460s, Edward made ‘great boast’ of the loyalty of men like John Say, a shrewd financial administrator; and when, in 1471, he all but eradicated the house of Lancaster in a bloody sequence of battles – among the few survivors was the 14-year-old Henry Tudor, who fled into exile in Brittany – he welcomed into his ...”

“... the agenda for much of Italian national life, both public and private. In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII’s famous encyclicals, Mater et magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), together with his summoning of the Second Vatican Council, produced great ferment in the Catholic world. But the radical tide ebbed, and the long and powerful pontificate of ...”

“... Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Adams’s 1821 Independence Day address to the House of Representatives was delivered while he was secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe. A sceptic ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”