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“... which is precluded by the structure of a whole situation has lost its grip on history. Michael Burleigh is surely on firm ground, however, in wondering whether Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union – a nightmare possibility of a Nazi-dominated Europe, but not one, as he shows, that can be dismissed as fantasy. Jonathan Haslam, arguing about ...”

“... know his party better’. Other senior Tories whom she also despised, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were summoned back into the fold as cover for her inability to devise a winning Brexit strategy. But Osborne, never. He didn’t stand in the 2017 general election. The dilemma May faced was how to square the circle Brexit had conjured up: on the ...”

“... any description of his extra-marital relationships, but he clearly wanted to set the record straight in some way so he drafted an extended account of them with instructions that it was only to be published after his death. (His son seems, perhaps prudently, to have decided that it should come out only after the death in 1983 of his father’s most ...”

“... When Will tries to explain that global warming is shaped like an upward curve, rather than a straight line, and that there’s no stopping it when it starts, she replies that it ‘sounds like a credit card’. Neither Heather nor the Sikh is particularly interesting; as Canaan’s Tongue suggested and Lowboy now proves, Wray has no gift for creating ...”

“... efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious ...”

“... than boats borne back into the past. Goldsmith himself claims his books are ‘impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly.’ He may or may not be pulling our leg. Such writing – so transparent (‘Watch for lanes being closed between exits 9 and ...”

“... make it tremendously intriguing. This new edition, introduced and heavily annotated by Michael Franklin, should be welcomed by both literary scholars and historians. A 1908 reprinting gave Hartly House the very apt subtitle ‘A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings’. When the book originally appeared in 1789, Hastings’s defence team was busily ...”

“... It is Sandra Fredman, among all the essayists in this book, who at least gets the questions straight; and it is not a coincidence that she starts an incisive essay on labour law and human rights by asking whether we ought not to be sceptical about scepticism. If there is a single area in which there is good historical reason not to trust the judges, it ...”

“... which challenges the assumption, shared by Greenberg, Clark, and Greenberg’s one-time protégé Michael Fried, that modern art is valuable as a defence and expression of the imagination; and Caroline Jones’s Eyesight Alone, in which she reads Greenberg against himself to show that his idea of a purely visual art hooks into modernity’s increasingly ...”

“... approach of pop historians such as William Shirer and T.L. Jarman, who were inclined to draw straight lines from Arminius of the Teutoburg Forest, to Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche and on to Hitler. Gay, along with other German émigré historians, such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern, helped change all that by pointing to the variegated hue and social ...”

“... this case of the French Ambassador’s secretary, Des Trappes. Also involved in this sham plot was Michael Moody, a former servant of Sir Edward Stafford’s in France and from the late 1580s an associate of Robert Poley, the veteran spy who was one of the men present at Marlowe’s death in Deptford. The early career of Thomas Drury seems to show us a young ...”

“... to find Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto just beginning, the unexpectedness of it taking me straight back to 1951, when I heard it for the first time. How lofty I thought my life was going to be then, just like this music; I saw myself modestly ascending shallow staircases to unspecified triumphs, with love disdained, or at any rate transcended, always ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 murders he committed in the North of England between 1975 and 1980, Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney-General, rose to tell the Judge that the Crown was dropping the charge of murder in favour of a guilty plea for manslaughter. Havers said that all the evidence tended towards the conclusion that ‘this is a case of diminished ...”

“... Anglo-American scholarship, the record of Mozart’s later career has probably been put about as straight as it will get. There remain a few mysteries, as the documentation of these years is – considering Mozart’s growing reputation during the period – surprisingly sparse. Few of his letters survive, fewer still that were written to him; many were ...”