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“... figure. A belief in his national importance led to his refusal in 1794 to visit his radical friend John Thelwall – when Thelwall was in Newgate charged with treason – on the grounds that Godwin must not jeopardise his own life, ‘this treasure which does not belong to me but to the public’. It is hard not to be reminded of the passage Jane Austen had ...”

“... designed and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous ...”

“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the ...”

“... the end of his second term as President it frequently was. She also played tough girl to his nice guy. Reagan desperately needed to be liked both by the voters and by those around him – a formidable weakness for a politician. I suspect that at least some of Nancy’s rudeness, bullying and nagging campaigns to get rid of people was a case of her doing what ...”

“... compelled to ‘light out’ for a more private struggle. Above all, the tradition of the ‘tough guy’ has been central to the sense of what made people different in America, ever since the English Captain John Smith began exploring the rivers of Virginia and got captured by the Indians. These are symptoms, not of a ...”

“... scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot O’Toole, and the 17 pages of laboratory entries she decided to copy from a colleague’s notebook – just in case ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special ...”

“... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...”

“... we move into a different period and a changed political climate. Muir was picked on as fall guy by the political establishment in the scare over the radical movement of 1792-4. He was a young advocate out on a limb, for his family background was not landowning. He was overconfident, indiscreet, and for a lawyer surprisingly unaware of the current ...”

“... the shawl. Snow stops work on the tarpaulin, the lay figure is out in the yard sitting ‘like a Guy’. Rossetti has borrowed his great coat and a pair of breeches, but at least some work is being done indoors: ‘Now the pattern [of the shawl] is all drawn and covered with a tint I put in the out door effect. To have painted it all out of doors would have ...”

“... girl – it was just the inconvenience that bothered him. In that sense he was a pretty selfish guy. This story sums up in a few lines all the major themes of Nigel Hamilton’s book – the over-whelming shadow of Joe Kennedy, Jacks’s unrelenting promiscuity, indeed his virtually psychopathic drive for sexual satisfaction, and the coldness and ...”

“... There are brilliant re-creations of Lenny Bruce’s edgy stand-up routines. He is ‘a handsome guy’ who ‘resembled a poolshark who’d graduated to deeper and sleazier schemes’, and Bruce’s repeated reminder, offered during the Cuban missile crisis, that ‘We’re all gonna die’, is said to give the comedian and his audience a spooky and ...”

“... the significance of background details such as the Reformation, the abdication crisis and Guy Fawkes night. Her tone is that of an anthropologist who has spotted an unknown tribe from a great distance. When stumped she reaches for a comparison with Downton Abbey. Like Penny Junor, she has written other royal biographies (of the queen and Princess ...”

“... Federation is a case study in total and irreversible impotence.’ In answer to Putin’s tough-guy boasts about wiping out ‘bandits’ and building a ‘strong state’, she calls for a President ‘who will defend the weak – according to the Constitution our state exists, first and foremost, for the good of the people’. Naive, to be sure, but ...”

“... his fictional texture. Fantasy is a hard discipline that rewards attention to detail. The critic Guy Davenport, a student of Tolkien’s, learned very little of the morphology and syntax of Old English from him; Tolkien wasn’t helped by his speech impediment and inability to keep to the point. But in a later conversation with Allen Barnett, who had been an ...”