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“... Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised. Dr Davis is also interesting on William Sprigge’s A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth of 1659, the anonymous Chaos (1659) and The Free State of Noland ...”

“... of the flesh secures him employment as a peripatetic stud on the books of an agency called Self Service. The agency is run by a butch lady called Victoria Self, who wears hausfrau braids and a blue serge suit, and who hints at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic craft. This is one apparent strand in the plot. Another is ...”

“... by two refugee physicists in Birmingham, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Robert Frisch, when they found that the critical mass of the fissile uranium isotope 235 needed for an explosion was no more than a few kilograms. In the summer of 1941 Peierls engaged Fuchs to help him with theoretical work on the project. Nine years later Fuchs ...”

“... disarray of entities, interests and occasions’. Some of these mechanisms no longer applied, and Robert Harley, the brilliant minister who investigated the Memorial, may have been bluffing when he wrote in 1702 that there remained ‘sufficient authoritys given by the Laws in being for suppressing’ seditious print. But new patches were being stitched onto ...”

“... of classical and medieval Latin poetry and, not least, the Christian concept of love as sacrifice, service and boundless longing. But the troubadours did not merely theorise love: they and their jongleurs performed their exquisitely crafted lyrics in the courts and towns of France, Italy, Spain and eventually all Europe. Regrettably, no more than 10 per cent ...”

“... provided was left with unappealing options: she could live with her family or she could enter service, offering her master and mistress obedience in exchange for bed, board and paltry wages. While suitable enough for girls, being a maidservant must have been galling for older women. Being single was thought suspicious: take Margery Noble, who entered the ...”

“... but for Macmillan’s generation the fact that the entire Labour front bench had avoided active service was something to be taken into account. ‘Poor Mr Gaitskell,’ Macmillan wrote in his diary after Armistice Day in 1960, ‘always seems a little conscious on these occasions that he has no medals. However, he supported the war, from Dr Dalton’s ...”

“... Northern counterparts, if not as the forebears of a European modernity that was still in embryo as Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox. More troublingly, the compatibility of slavery with these ‘conjectures of order’ raises questions about the integrity both of American history and of the modern world that O’Brien’s Southerners imperfectly ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... grunt Tim O’Brien, face the darkness squarely. The third, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, merely pretends to. In his own way, however, each writer tells the story of a quest or a flight, a search for redemption and understanding, a search for the truth, or an escape from it. Each, in his own way, is likewise a cipher for the American ...”

“... being given by Jones on ‘Early Female Sexuality’ and Joan Riviere, and those from Vienna by Robert Waelder. In June 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria forced Freud and his family to flee to London, whither they had been preceded by a number of Berlin analysts. (Most of the Viennese analysts went on to America; only Willi and Hedwig Hoffer settled in ...”

“... she stayed all weekend. If the Labour Party could fight the election on the state of the Health Service alone, it would win hands down. 29 May. A letter from N. at Oxford saying that John Carey thinks my ‘Kafka at Las Vegas’ too ‘ruminative and ambling’ to qualify for a university-sponsored lecture. N., though finding it ‘a good read’, tends to ...”

“... had been created that benefited all classes, not simply the poor and unemployed. A National Health Service had been set up which Hennessy defiantly describes as ‘one of the finest institutions ever built by anyone anywhere’ (and after living in the United States for three years, I can say amen to that). The doctors grumbled, as did their better-heeled ...”

“... whether a political career is the product of dedication to principle, devotion to public service, or a serious personality disorder. But the historians on whose sifting of the record political history mostly depends are less willing to lend themselves to this ‘human interest’ approach than they used to be. Three years ago, Patrick O’Brien, then ...”

“... mention that fact that many Middle East hands passed through a revolving door between government service and lucrative jobs in the Arabian-American oil consortium Aramco. In some cases, anti-Semitism – or at least a patrician unease about the growing Jewish-American influence on US Middle East policy – may have played into foreign ...”