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“... Perhaps rather carefully, the words at the head of Graham Greene’s new novel are ascribed to William Shakespeare rather than to Hamlet, but inevitably it’s Hamlet they bring to mind. Very Hamlet, this complete scepticism – but not, surely, very Graham Greene; and what has it to do with a novel on the theme of Don Quixote? Turgenev brought Hamlet and ...”

“... adviser wrote. The best he could do was to reach for a fictional comparison: ‘weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand “diviner” who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger’. ‘That girl’ is Cayce Pollard, the 32-year-old protagonist of Pattern Recognition (2003). She ...”

“... owed a debt in turn to Marco Polo. Less famous, but no less fascinating, is the Franciscan William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium, written about forty years before Polo’s work. A reluctant messenger for Louis IX, later St Louis, William carried a letter from the French monarch to Kublai’s predecessor, Möngke ...”

“... craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible for this sober aesthetic, and religious impulses compelled other artistic rebels of the same period to purge the studio of ornamental trifles. In France, a cult of remote antiquity led the Primitifs to rebel ...”

“... have been ‘rather clamorously discovered’ in recent years, and the convenient invention of a brand name ‘Luminism’. In these discoveries, or rather rediscoveries, art historians are likely to work closely with dealers – both need new ‘fields’. However, the process is not quite as cynical as the promotion of ‘new Jackson Pollocks’: it ...”

“... equipped with 2000 cannons and 450,000 firearms. Thiers’s new government embodied a conservative brand of republicanism. He had been prime minister under Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy in 1836, 1840 and 1848, and was later a fierce opponent of Napoleon III. He was far from being the kind of leader the Parisian militants wanted in power. Thiers had promised ...”

“... only to have their achievement hijacked by a shrewd representative of Scandinavian carpet-baggers, William of Normandy. William’s Angevin successors then created a power of continent-wide importance, an Anglo-French polity that represented these islands’ best effort yet at European integration; but it had fallen apart ...”

“... The future isn’t what it used to be. In one of William Gibson’s first published stories, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, a photographer is assigned to capture examples of ‘futuristic’ American design from the Thirties, the kind of dream architecture that graced the covers of pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories ...”

“... such detail to start with but then became shy of it. Yeats had taken up dreams, as a proof of his brand of spiritualism; he was especially pleased at finding a dream which had drifted across country, occupying one person after another. (One must agree that such a dream could not be produced by the unconsciousness of each person separately.) So the ...”

“... edited by Louis Zukofsky I’d never have developed as a poet – I literally went to school to William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky and have had the good fortune to call the latter friend and mentor. Well – there was an influence (from transition and the surrealistes that has always seemed to want to ride right along with the ...”

“... me’. He was aware that Wilberforce had presented a version of his arguments at a meeting in the brand-new Museum of Natural History in Oxford, and there were reports of an altercation with T.H. Huxley, who was a friend of Darwin’s and a zealous convert to the doctrine of mutability. There is considerable doubt as to what actually happened that day in ...”

“... which equally prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. This was largely brought about by William finance his wars against F near of the ‘rationalism and human he 1640s and 1 how the ‘revolutionary deca checke belief in witchcraft. We do not hear of Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder-general (d. 1647), whose activities in the rational and humane ...”

“... the plantation into the present, even though the cast of characters look unchangingly antebellum. (William Kentridge, the South African artist and filmmaker who also alludes to magic-lantern shows, has staged similarly ironic festivities and pageants – though with a more raucous sense of drama – as he too explores the changing tensions around race in ...”

“... to be relatively luxurious or relatively cheap. A clever all-denim piece that keeps intact the brand names emblazoned on jean pockets (Gloria Vanderbilt, Jordache, Levi-Strauss) – a disorienting rebus-like surface – registers the differing prestige afforded to identical material. Synthetic calico is set next to a Mexican serape poncho which is placed ...”

“... being issued with a reminder of what was “plainly” the case.’ He is little interested in William Empson’s brand of close reading with its minute verbal explication. His critical writing often deploys extended quotation as if the best writing proves itself. But he had a virtue that would be rare among leading ...”