Search Results

“... productions written for the occasion in a distinctly Pickwickian manner. Its members included William Godwin junior, son of the political philosopher by his second wife, whose account of the origins of Shakespeare’s genius, a poem called ‘Olympian Mulberry Leaves; or, The Offerings of the Gods to Shakespear’, is every bit as Gothic as anything ...”

“... with much else, notably a roaring debate about the existence of God between Seltzer and a flinty Christian in Harvard Memorial Church. Goldstein trained as a philosopher (she has taught at Columbia, Rutgers, Harvard, Brandeis and Trinity College Hartford). Her books hug the East Coast strip bounded by Princeton in the south (where she earned her PhD under ...”

“... in the academy (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between ...”

“... as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went ...”

“... against the main Protestant rival for maritime and commercial empire, the Dutch; and by the 1680s, William Petty was writing about the ‘Dominion of the Sea’ and the utility of a blatantly navalist strategy: ‘such as desire empire & liberty … let them encourage the art of ship-building.’ This notion that maritime empire was fully compatible with ...”

“... by three botanists, each supposedly stumbling on it independently. In 1906, William Bateson, the most forceful champion of Mendel’s work in Britain, dubbed the new science ‘genetics’. Those 34 years of obscurity have fascinated historians of science. Why was such a major advance overlooked for so long? That Mendel published in ...”

“... embarrassment. (Forget about the blood pressure.) In May 1382 the new archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, an old adversary, convened a council at Blackfriars, famous for concluding its deliberations in the middle of a small earthquake, which condemned Wyclif’s more obvious heresies, a weapon aimed more at his Oxford followers than at Wyclif ...”

“... ought probably to be signed and punctuated so that visitors don’t saunter away from a Christian Ethiopian mural (out of Africa) to find themselves in front of a Brazilian fish mask (into the Americas) used for warding off sickness during the dry season. The objects on show might then begin to look as good as the displays in the Pavillon des ...”

“... inhabitants? Baskin Robbins is here. Pizza Hut, I see from the hoardings, is also on its way. Christian Dior is another sign I notice. At the Hotel Rossia, the television and the radio in our room have been switched on to welcome us. Andrei, our interpreter, produces money to cover our expenses, meals and so forth. We sign for 130 roubles each. Andrei ...”

“... English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and ...”

“... nation to have vindicated the higher principles of humanity.’ The Leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, seconding Disraeli’s vote of thanks to the troops who had pulled off this masterly campaign, could only acquiesce. Unfortunately, however, Disraeli meant by the purity of his purpose precisely the opposite of the course the Guardian was ...”

“... imagined progress – from an oral original form in pagan times to its modern meaning as a Christian allegory. The three chapters on Keats, Byron and Coleridge are all important, at times brilliant. The first has a polemical quality, for Keats has long been a favourite poet of the formalists, as Helen Vendler’s accomplished but airless study of the ...”

“... the handlooms of the Bengal weavers, whose delicate silks and muslins were prized all over Europe. William Bentinck, governor of Madras and later governor-general, wrote that ‘the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India.’ Tariffs of 70 per cent and more were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded ...”

“... Collectors’ fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio ...”

“... Gray’s poetry that has something to do with his instinct for Latin. The ‘massive calm’ that William Empson found and resented in the Elegy – and that might well have soothed Wolfe and his comrades – surely derives from this. Empson heard in Gray’s famous lines on the unfulfilled potential of the humble villagers the poet’s melancholy acceptance ...”