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“... outcomes such as the decline of Chartism or the nature of Labour politics. Joyce and his student James Vernon then charged Lawrence and Taylor with a ‘complacent’ desire to appropriate the tools of linguistic analysis while undermining its epistemological radicalism. All the two camps could agree on was that the Americans were hopelessly wrong in ...”

“... When James Ellroy’s latest cod-cosmic rehash of his troubled – and troubling – life arrived on my doorstep I assumed the business of reacquainting myself with the terrain shouldn’t be that difficult. The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women is, on the face of it, a substantiation of Ellroy’s previous memoir, My Dark Places, in which he employed the true-crime plot device of hiring his own homicide detective, formerly of the LA sheriff’s department, in order to reopen the investigation into the unsolved murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, in 1958 ...”

“... documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice ...”

“... Lawyers have seldom had a good press. According to Shelley’s father-in-law, William Godwin, a lawyer could ‘scarcely fail to be a dishonest man’, though that, he added, was ‘less a subject for censure than regret’. Shelley’s friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, being himself a barrister, could not go quite so far, but his verdict was almost as sweeping: the most profound ignorance is ...”

“... please), and all who made ‘rather a May game of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of friends, accompanying the bridegroom and bride both to and from the ...”

“... solution as those two. Reviewing Wives and Daughters for the Nation in 1866, the 22-year-old Henry James wrote that Mrs Gaskell’s genius was ‘so obviously the offspring of her affections, her feelings, her associations and (considering that, after all, it was genius) was so little of an intellectual nature’. But though she displayed, ‘considering her ...”

“... that are marked by the wooden mould.In the late 1760s and early 1770s, the Pacific voyages of James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, among others, introduced Europeans to the tattooing traditions of the Polynesian islands; the word ‘tattoo’ itself derives from the Tahitian tatau – to mark or strike the skin. Sydney Parkinson, Cook’s ...”

“... ingenuity to convey it. But the restless contemporaneity of her vision makes a stark contrast with William Cooper’s impeccable Scenes from Metropolitan Life, written in the 1950s but held back from publication up to the present day for legal reasons. Cooper’s work, falling between the celebrated Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married ...”

“... exchanged with the gentlemen. After that a riot broke out, the guards had to be called from St James’s to restore order and the night ended with a £100 bill for damages and a great deal of heated comment in the papers. According to one of the supper party, Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, who sent an excited account of the events to his friend ...”

“... Library as Additional MSS 60168-60256, thanks to the good offices of Noakes’s widow, Thompson, William Lamont and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun? There followed from the appropriation of the Muggletonian archive a practical exploration of a ...”

“... the mercantile air’. Here Sandage becomes a master sleuth. For example, he introduces us to Dr William Henry Brisbane, who enters the Mercantile Agency’s books in 1844 as a go-ahead fellow with $22,000 and 100 acres of land. Two years later, a second entry dramatically revises the bottom line. Brisbane, it turned out, had inherited $100,000 and quickly ...”

“... are, how limited agency often is, how contingent, opportunistic and unpredictable change can be. William Morris’s words might resonate with Bevins’s Brazilian protesters: ‘Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to ...”

“... They are good for the best and least complicated of reasons: the author can write. Wherever Gunner James Witte turns his eye he finds something interesting, needing studying, and he interests us in it too – amazingly. First, it is how, as a Territorial, to pose as a dashing royal Horse Artillery man. There was a tailor in the village where we were billeted ...”

“... friend over a long period. Like Cotton, Jonson was a pupil at Westminster of the great historian William Camden, with whom Cotton formed perhaps the most important friendship of his life. Any age can mock the values of another. Cotton’s antiquarianism is at times a tempting target. Member of Parliament for the archetypal rotten borough of Old ...”

“... between them these two engaging old monstres profanes have produced a book as entertaining as a James Bond novel with the same pace, excitement and high standard of consumer durables, feminine splendour and male chauvinist piggery. The Baron broke all the rules of seduction, he says, with ‘two exceptions. I never deflower and I do not persist if the lady ...”