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“... serenity. Its silences demand interpretation. ‘Few and evil have been the days of my life,’ Jacob declares as his wanderings come to an end.Marilynne Robinson is interested in readers of Scripture (she always capitalises the word). It furnishes the mental world of her characters and structures their stories. Her Gilead novels are a refraction of ...”

“... was trumped by the insistence of Leigh’s fellow Tory MP, the ‘keen constitutional student’ Jacob Rees-Mogg, that the motion to delay undermined a privilege of the Commons ‘codified as long ago as 1678’. Rees-Mogg had a solution: the prime minister must create 150 new peers to make absolutely sure that the Conservatives could pass whatever ...”

“... our daily expenses’) and anecdotes about people who subsequently became famous – Rousseau, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein – held together by vanity, an idea of how she wanted to be perceived by readers. In the summer of 1930 extracts were published in Le Soir. Though the tone was guarded and the content anodyne, Picasso was furious. She talked ...”

“... in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered everything from a flea circus to a waxworks display under one roof. Books had their place along with vaudeville, Abolitionist songs and the Fiji mermaid. In February 1848, Bartlett and Welford, ‘Booksellers and ...”

“... sunrise at Stonehenge. How was that image created? The Stonehenge connection goes back to John Aubrey, who first recognised the monuments at Avebury in 1649 and then spent nearly fifty years writing and talking about, but never quite finishing, his projected Templa Druidum. He was followed by William Stukeley, Anglican clergyman and ‘pagan ...”

“... and Portugal, and the new kabbalistic ideas coming from the school of Isaac Luria in Palestine. John Freely’s lively book is basically a retelling of Scholem’s story enriched by the author’s knowledge of the Ottoman background. His one significant addition to Scholem is his suggestion as to where Sabbatai might be buried. Freely has omitted all of ...”

“... address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the backbench MP Miriam Cates, who blamed ‘cultural Marxism’ for declining birth rates. Before the conference started, journalists and paying punters milled ...”

“... was summoned to Bow Street to show cause why it should not be destroyed in the public interest. John Hall (to give her the name she preferred) was not called upon to give evidence, and was silenced, when she tried to interrupt, by the magistrate. In this way the Beaverbrook press started The Well on its career as the best-known lesbian novel in the English ...”

“... it in the midst of all his revisions; hard to place as an excerpt of a larger fiction (its editor, John Callahan, said it constituted the ‘centre’ while Ellison did not live to complete ‘the wings’); and still, even after Rampersad’s detailing of his later years, hard to place among Ellison’s late changes of perspective. The final page of ...”

“... either between classes or between good and bad deeds: the sins and errors of Adam and Jacob and David are as important as the humility and obedience of Abraham and Moses.’ There are, of course, moral judgments in the Bible, but the Bible is not a moral tale, a collection of exempla, for all that Jews and Christians alike have often read so. Nor ...”

“... and ‘broadcast power around the entire planet’. In the spring of 1899 he secured $100,000 from John Jacob Astor IV (later the richest man to drown on the Titanic) for the development of a new lighting system. Disregarding Astor’s expressed intentions, Tesla spent it on moving his entire wireless-power operation to the mountain resort of Colorado ...”

“... On 23 January,​ Jacob Rees-Mogg reintroduced the country to the concept of prorogation – the suspension of Parliament by the monarch. Like Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg is fond of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament ...”

“... Art could take on political dimensions as it reaffirms the necessity of the utopian. Jacob Kramer’s ‘Jews at Prayer’ (1913) In this light the hefty centrepiece of Migrations – a selection of Tate holdings organised, at Curtis’s behest, by Lizzie Carey-Thomas – is the 59-minute film Handsworth Songs. In the wake of the 1985 ...”

“... to enter his enclosure, and slides around in his own darkness. Exactly 146 interviews later, John le Carré, our premier narrative spook-meister, exhibits, by his own admission, that knack whereby the memory fails and the lie takes over. There is something in his tone that advises us not to believe him too much. The interview took place in 1997, more ...”

“... we must be grateful to scholars who have done it well. Two names spring at once to mind: those of Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, written in 1860, is still required reading on its subject; and Johan Huizinga, who wrote in Burckhardt’s shadow about the same centuries (though not the same area), and in 1919 achieved the same ...”