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“... Guiccioli and her husband, and so on? Are we still interested in the tempests with Lady Caroline Lamb? It is all the worse realising that it will end with the expedition to join the Greek War of Independence, uncomfortably like the scheme of a fantasist. ‘Writing, even with genius, did not appear to him to fulfil a great man’s duty: it had to be linked ...”

“... a long and distinguished pedigree this analysis has. It is perhaps the most celebrated part of Robert Michels’s Political Parties (originally published in 1911) – ‘who says organisation says oligarchy’ – and self-recruiting oligarchies were, Michels believed, a tendency intrinsic to all modern democratic parties. Defeat from the Jaws of Victory ...”

“... does this, a page earlier: It was an English barbecue. There were sausages and burgers and minted lamb kebabs. Australian wine and Belgian lager. It was not cold, but the sky was solidly overcast. They talked about house prices. Mike was very pleased with how little the house had cost him because of its proximity to the airport … and insisted … that they ...”

“... rightly thinking it available elsewhere, but he does publish the touching letter Max wrote to Robert Ross, Oscar’s premier initiator, when he was in New York with his half-brother, the famous impresario Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. A Canadian adventurer and confirmed homosexual, Ross was a remarkable and on the whole a rather good man, who became influential ...”

“... George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a cobbler who was converted ...”

“... But the book also conveys an intriguing sense of the uncertain status of the area. In 1825, when Robert Peel complained that ‘if the national gallery were banished to the neighbourhood of St Giles’s and Russell-square it would much lessen the value of the collection,’ he was implying that Bloomsbury was irredeemably dodgy. It bordered a notorious ...”

“... Past a hall of portraits showing successive principals since 1966, the head rowing coach Bill Lamb sat in a room under an overactive air-conditioning system. ‘To educate mind, body and spirit,’ he said, ‘and show how these three components make a complete person, that is the Jesuit mantra.’ Like many of the people I talked to about John Spahr, Mr ...”

“... flexibility which enabled Lord Denning to his own satisfaction to temper the wind to the shorn lamb’. A drink-driving conviction delayed for 15 years Russell’s appointment as a lord of appeal, which must be deemed sufficient reason for putting it on record. Lord Denning also sustains a passing bruise in Lord Archer of Sand-well’s entry on Lord ...”

“... Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away ...”

“... her own new-born’s smell as she licks off the birth fluids. After that she will suckle no other lamb, butting away any interlopers. Primates, like dogs, are good adopters. Within a monkey troop, or even among ring-tailed lemurs, females may nurse and carry the young of related females. Orphans who are old enough to feed themselves can be reared by other ...”

“... escapes through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic ...”

“... the making, and a youthful protégée of Henry Adams and Henry James. She is shown having tea at Lamb House and receiving Henry Adams’s blessing on the youth of the new century; and Empire, by and large, sustains our curiosity about the belle époque of early 20th-century American power. In Hollywood Caroline again provides the focus of narrative ...”

“... present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.’ In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition ...”

“... procreational theory that constructs the male role as creative and the female role as nurturing. (Robert Alter is praised for using the word ‘seed’ in his translation of Genesis, where others fudge the problem by using ‘posterity’, ‘descendants’ or ‘progeny’. But the praise is immediately revoked: ‘Writing in the late 20th century, he cannot ...”

“... authors of the Middle English ‘Charters of Christ’ saw when they compared God’s sacrificial Lamb to the lambs that supplied their writing material. As the Word made flesh, Christ declares that his body, like parchment, was stretched on a frame and dried on a tree. Then the letters that spell redemption were inscribed on his skin, with nails for ...”