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“... rapacious and an infidel of blackest dye, rescued on his deathbed from certain damnation by the man she would come to know for an unprincipled humbug, Gilbert Burnet. She must have known that the role Burnet cast for himself in Some Passages in the Life and Death of the Earl of Rochester was a lie; Rochester’s steward wrote to Sir Ralph Verney that ...”

“... cult. He was in fact an unparalleled witness, at least to his time. But he was an unpopular man. It’s precisely what one might adore about him – the tolerance, the internationalism, the political sagacity, the ability to be both artist and doer, the attachment to the ideals of workers’ democracy and freedom of thought – that galled many of his ...”

“... would continue to reinforce the ethic of empire, both at its creation and in its dismantling. (Paul Scott’s fictional Chillingborough, the school which binds together so many of the characters in the Raj Quartet, much to the outsider Merrick’s disgust, was a typically perceptive creation.) Such establishment Anglo-Indian connections would also be made ...”

“... hostility to Oslo, and had compared trading land for peace to appeasement with Hitler. Mishal, Paul McGeough writes in Kill Khalid, his gripping account of the plot, was selected from a list of targets by Netanyahu not only because he was suspected of orchestrating the suicide bomb campaign, but because he made an articulate case for Hamas’s position, in ...”

“... ill-planned, reflecting the random interests of donors and local patronage networks. It is a brave man who reveals these things: it is an even braver one who honestly tries to explain the source which he believes is poisoning a potentially viable development. Bista locates two main causes, which are again interconnected. In his view, the root cause of fatalism ...”

“... it could readily prove an intellectual nightmare. Writing a very short book about any very great man is unlikely to be easy. But the difficulty is certain to be augmented where the brief for the book is not merely to tell the story of a human life but also to interpret the authority which that life discloses, and to make clear how far this authority was ...”

“... and now am old; my cup runneth over; many a time; clean gone; the days of old; I am a worm and no man; his heart’s desire; the heavens declare the glory of god; go down to the sea in ships; at their wits’ end; the valley of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . . The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of ...”

“... closed eyelids and the immanent presence of the sacred’.Jay begins his history in the Chavín de Huántar, a temple in the High Andes of Peru rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1930s. A carved figure in an inner sanctum, ‘snake-haired, sprouting fangs and claws’ and wielding a San Pedro cactus like an upraised baguette, has been dated to 1200 bce ...”

“... extremely excited when reading the early papers of the distinguished Austrian/American biologist, Paul Weiss, who had transplanted the legs of a salamander from back to front and left to right and found the specificity of the original position not only retained but reflected in the very limb movements. Medawar was so entranced and intrigued by the phenomenon ...”

“... sad months’ in Bellevue mental hospital. As a full-blown Romantic he would read these years as a De Quincey-like apprenticeship: vignettes of poverty, endless movement around the same small nexus of streets, the Village, Little Italy. He was ‘God’s spy’, a poet fink keeping secret notebooks. The early poems are about his mother and the sea, their ...”

“... True to the geneticist André Lwoff’s dictum, ‘L’art du chercheur, c’est d’abord de se trouver un bon patron,’ he began his career in physics as the pupil of Germany’s greatest teacher, Arnold Sommerfeld. In the early Twenties, atomic physics was dominated by Niels Bohr’s model of electrons circling like planets around the sun-like ...”

“... divine intervention would be led by a powerful supernatural figure whom Jesus called the Son of Man. When Jesus was executed and the Kingdom of God failed to materialise, his followers reworked his message. Paul taught that Jesus had been resurrected bodily up to heaven and would return at any moment to gather his ...”

“... review. To many traditionalists this decline is a source of regret. Not the least merit of Paul Halliday’s enthralling and scholarly historical survey, focusing primarily on the years 1500-1800, is to remind us of what could be seen as the glory days of habeas corpus. John Anderson was a slave in Missouri. Separated from his wife and family, whom he ...”

“... from a profound consciousness of what it is to be a woman, she writes, as they say, ‘like a man’: that is, she betrays none of the collusive charm which is supposedly a mark of the feminine genius. As a result, because she writes as a woman, not like a woman, Randall Jarrell could say of The Man Who Loved Children ...”

“... is for ‘possessiveness’, with ‘wit’ the runner-up. Nancy’s wit was in-your-face. To a man who claimed ‘that his family had never married beneath them, she replied: “I know they can’t but I never knew they realised it.” ’ Fox’s list tells you all you need to know about Nancy, but leaves out her charm, which was ‘such that we all fell ...”