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“... a physicist and eminent populariser of science told the producer that whereas a genius such as Michael Faraday would have been awarded three different Nobel Prizes had they then existed, Maxwell would only have won one. No room for him on Auntie’s Olympus. I have no idea which of Maxwell’s achievements might have gained this anachronistic reward: his ...”

“... shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its ...”

“... Wordsworth’s genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always remained outside them. He never seems identified with his own discoveries, even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... leaves the historian with a number of quibbles – in particular, the leading role assigned to Michael Collins in all the events of 1919-22. Yet on fundamental interpretation Kee is less dogmatic and, above all, less Anglo-centric; greener here, indeed, than in his previous book, The Green Flag. It is not simply that he adds an Irish dimension to the ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”

“... Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As Dearborn notes in a wonderful chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller’s Paris address, ‘most of the editors were ...”

“... The person who elicited his strongest feelings was a young officer met during the war, called Robert MacGill (Hogg ‘loved him’, he said, ‘almost like an adopted son’). Hogg’s conduct was wild, irascible and volatile, both verbally and physically (he got into a number of fist fights at Oxford). He also had what another brother, Neil, described as ...”

“... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...”

“... West Park Row, which he shares with his second wife, Johanna, and their two children, Eva and Michael. Arthur’s first wife, Franziska, was killed at Auschwitz, but his memories of her are so vivid that he is able to project images from their past together onto the wall of the title, a symbol, for him, of both the limits of meaning and of his ...”

“... connections between these works and subsequent debates over the development of New York – with Robert Moses’s highways, bridges and office towers pitched against Jane Jacobs’s street life and public characters – he is able to show that there is nothing epiphenomenal about urban cultural production. ‘There is a significant and surprisingly direct ...”

“... political edge could be tolerated: anyone who showed any sign of that kind of talent was, like Michael Heseltine, bound to come to grief. By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated handbagging. Crucially, when ...”

“... useful theatre for the new ruler that chimed with a sense of De tribus’s (non-existent) thesis; Michael Servetus (1511-53), burned at the stake; and Bernardino Ochino, author of Disputa intorno (Basel, 1561), and ‘that villain and secretary of hell’ (according to Thomas Browne) who converted to all three religions in turn, before becoming (in Kenelm ...”

“... but is cited by the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Bush’s head of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, who claimed that Bauer provided a model of how to interrogate prisoners. The movie Rules of Engagement was another common source of populist legalism, invoked to exonerate those who use extreme measures to extract ‘vital’ information. And ...”

“... and it has to be faced. To invent something more elevated and comfortable, the kind of thing that Robert Nozick offered in his Philosophical Explanations (a book that Williams described as an attempt at the ‘Great American Novel of philosophy’), will not do. Some of the analytical arguments in the book were brilliant, but at the end Nozick departed from ...”