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“... time. (Before setting off to walk in Izaak Walton’s footsteps, he ‘fortifies himself with a major fry-up’; and skewers Walton for lifting ‘other people’s work left, right and centre’). Even if his word-hoard is leaden, the aroma of wonder seeps through his sentences. Buried beneath the anecdote and the arcana is the poignancy of the ...”

“... but at night he’s an amateur astronomer. He’s dismissive of fears that the association with John Wyndham’s 1950s novel won’t do the controversy-strewn world of GM any favours; and he’s done that clever thing of appropriating an opponent’s discourse: the Canadian triffid is an ironic (and more modern) riposte to all the talk about Frankenstein ...”

“... but at the highest levels it was sufficiently bipartisan. In October 2002, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry voted for Bush’s request to authorise the use of force. Barack Obama, then a state senator in Illinois, gave a speech against it; and nobody who knows the history would blame the present conflict in the Middle East on Obama. Indeed, after the ...”

“... School of painting in the first two thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ...”

“... large slogan blazoning CIVIL WAR, a vast floor-to-ceiling map of England, marking the sites of the major battles, another information panel, plus eight suits of armour fixed like trophies to the wall. The wood-block floor has been covered with some ‘period-feel’ black and white squared linoleum. The museological debates that such a contrast raises hardly ...”

“... per cent of the sample who admitted to having more than one sex partner in the previous year. The major weakness of the American report, however, is that the sample, a mere 3400 respondents, is too small. For example, the data on homosexuality are based on a sample of only the 150 women and 143 men who reported any same-gender sexuality. Originally designed ...”

“... different kinds of inability to act: these are the overt themes of many of the poems in John Fuller’s inventive new volume. The title, Lies and Secrets, does not belong to any one poem, but is a warning that no statement found in the book should be relied on either for straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are ...”

“... England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially ...”

“... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...”

“... organised teams of scholars. One might add that this is a job which could not have been done in a major library, not the Folger, nor the Huntington, nor the Bodleian, nor the British – or not from their own resources. It could only have been done in a place with access to the complete Short-Title Catalogue series of University Micro-film from Ann ...”

“... writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... states and onto Russia alone, proclaiming the closeness of the US, and by extension the other major Western powers, to the Yeltsin Presidency and Government. But this policy has come under increasing attack, first from outside the Administration and now from within, in the aftermath of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit which saw Clinton trumpeting his belief in ...”

“... support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he ...”

“... was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in ...”

“... From within a few weeks of its opening in May 1956, it’s been accepted that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits ...”