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“... to intimidate the heterosexual reader. Whereas most other gay novelists concentrated on the young and solitary protagonist, afraid to avow his forbidden desires, or on the gay couple (sensitive, noble, tormented), living in a forest or by the sea or in any event in romantic isolation (the alibi of love), Genet was picturing the gaudy homosexual ghetto ...”

“... last someone has dared to speak out …’ Some of Powell’s lifelong opponents, including the young Devon MP Michael Heseltine, conceded that their constituents, even in rural areas which had scarcely seen a black face, were right behind Enoch. If the present system of election to the Tory leadership had been in operation, he would have swept home in any ...”

“... and is attentive to Smith’s range of allusion – Homer, Pindar, Seneca, Catullus, Wither, Young, Blake, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot and many more. May’s interest in Smith’s performances makes you want to return to her recordings, gets you to think about the kind of life her voice could bring to the poems, and prompts you to ...”

“... you off their books. I came across another example of the broken containment field in the work of Arthur Upfield, who wrote a series of novels in the 1930s and onwards featuring an indigenous Australian detective, Bony, short for Napoleon Bonaparte. Upfield’s masterpiece, The Sands of Windee, is a well-realised and vivid book, and teaches you a lot about ...”

“... who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in the Moon. What is more interesting than Falstaff’s ancient joke is ...”

“... keeping the lights on in London.’ The mania​ for boreholes reminded me of a cautionary tale by Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed’. Doyle’s crazed superman scientist, Professor Challenger, who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than ...”

“... most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in the world’. Wilde, he wrote, was ‘charming, at the same time; unimaginable, and, above all, a very great ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”

“... Jesus Meant, Garry Wills, a sophisticated Catholic liberal, tells a story about comforting his young son, who had woken in the night, afraid that, as the nuns at school had taught, he would go to hell if he sinned. ‘There is not an ounce of heroism in my nature,’ Wills writes, ‘but I instantly answered what any father would: “All I can say is that ...”

“... products. Early experiments had been conducted on chimpanzees, but that was expensive.Professor Arthur Bloom, director of the haemophilia centre at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff and the UK’s leading specialist, wrote in a letter dated January 1982 that the obvious solution was to test on humans by ‘administering those concentrates to patients ...”

“... with which to end an introduction to the English comic writers. But not everybody likes Rabelais. Young Calvin did. The later Calvin did not. Nor did the Council of Trent – where the French were a tiny minority. Rabelais’s Christian comedy was too much for Pius IV. His Index Tridentinus (1564) casts Rabelais among the ‘forbidden authors of the first ...”

“... militance of the Scottish labour movement was fatally undermined by the hubris of the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, forcing the Scottish left ‘to look to the nationalists as a bulwark against “English” politics’.At its root, Lloyd argues, the case for independence relies ‘on seeing England, or Englishness, or the English, as malign influences on the ...”

“... had just been laid off from digging the Regent’s Canal, while another member of the committee, Arthur Thistlewood, urged them to bring ‘a spike-nail in the end of a stick or anything that would run into a fellow’s guts’. The subsequent riots were the worst since the Gordon riots of the 1780s, ending in chaos and a humiliating failed attempt to suborn ...”

“... seat, in Manchester North West, which had a substantial Jewish electorate. In December 1905 Arthur Balfour resigned after his short, fraught spell as Tory prime minister, and the new Liberal government called an election which they would win by a landslide. Having already spoken against Balfour’s Aliens Bill, which was designed to restrict Jewish ...”