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“... Nativity) but in the High Renaissance ‘magus’ came to mean a worker of occult marvels, using powers that in Simon’s case had turned out to be demonic. Magic also seemed unnecessary to some commentators, who exalted human-wrought wonders such as shipbuilding, navigation, land reclamation, explosives, cryptography and mechanical automata – a tradition ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... power. Although its military power is daunting, America’s political, economic and ideological powers are much more modest. Such discriminations are important because military power is not especially useful for achieving many of the US’s most important goals. This is true even in the realm of national security. The principal security threats identified ...”

“... the nature of most of the techniques used (‘stealth methods’, so called); second, the choking powers of secrecy available to our government; and third, the haphazard way in which information about these matters emerges, when it emerges at all, which hampers our ability to ask the most basic questions. We are now in the endgame of a cycle that started in ...”

“... iconography of Gustave Moreau, who died of old age before the century was out. D’Annunzio and Richard Strauss shamelessly employed Symbolist props and decor that had grown tatty with fifty years of constant use. But with Brennan the trappings were the inspiration. His nominal subject – the nominal subject never really nominated – was merely the ...”

“... is evident that some of the energy of the writing springs from a desire to show up those wrongful powers (placid companies, exclusive civic corporations, Anglican clerics, rich and idle gentles and the idle poor) who impede the work of others. He is, however, respectful of the work of the labouring poor, and here, too, the modern editors do not accompany him ...”

“... name and was meant to consign the sectarian convulsions of the decade to the past. In 1659, under Richard Cromwell, Marvell obtained his parliamentary seat as a court nominee sent from Whitehall to defeat a powerful republican candidate. When the Parliament met he savoured the defeat of the republicans and of their ‘maxim’ that ‘all power is in the ...”

“... by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered ...”

“... it was the Democratic coterie that had elevated him which rallied round. The campaign was led by Richard Holbrooke, imposing the changes in Annan’s entourage that were deemed necessary to save him. In fact, what is really striking about Annan’s tenure as secretary-general is less his personal characteristics than the nature of the inner circle that ...”

“... the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of ...”

“... Marlowe, in his stale office in Downtown, snarling alternately at the punk scum and the powers-that-be, was a political time-bomb waiting to explode. In their agony and panic no less than 100,000 bedrock Republicans crossed the lines in 1934 to vote for the socialist Upton Sinclair in his gubernatorial campaign conducted under the slogan ‘End ...”

“... disorderly ordure. Freud was unusual in devoting some attention to the relatively feeble olfactory powers of human beings, and philosophers, as Corbin remarks, have tended to ignore the sense of smell on the grounds that it has little to do with thinking, and smell, when strong, is associated with animality. Kant excluded it from aesthetics. Yet there were ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... architects to think there was anything for them in new Tube stations besides the ‘fit-out’. As Richard MacCormac, whose firm has designed the new Southwark Station, put it: ‘the engineers design the system, then the architects dress it up. Was it just a matter of deciding which tiles to put on the platform walls?’ When Paoletti started looking for ...”

“... phenomena. Even baker’s yeast, when choosing a mate, is credited with subtle discriminatory powers of a type that one would not normally expect from a fungus. The revolutionary import of the Zahavis’ view is well illustrated by their discussion of that touchstone for evolutionary biologists, the peacock’s tail. For the Zahavis, each feature of the ...”