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“... theory of history similar to that of Vico and taken over by Matthew Arnold from his father Thomas: the fifth century BC, when Greek religion was challenged by the Greek enlightenment, was often held to correspond with the period when the modern Enlightenment was challenging Christianity. The third method depended upon Comte’s theory of the three ...”

“... whales sing sagas of great acts of sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.’ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is a splendid storyteller and has some splendid stories to tell, also wishes to persuade us that we have underestimated the analogies between humans and animals and, because her accounts are so circumstantial, she often succeeds. The most surprising ...”

“... by Gunnar Heiberg was a parody of the Norwegian national anthem. While in Paris, according to Sir Thomas Beecham, he showed a ‘decided preference for low life’, and we can be fairly certain he contracted syphilis there. The Treponema lay low in him until 1910, when he had a severe bilious attack and developed headaches and back pain, severe enough for him ...”

“... As a student at St Thomas’s Hospital, I used to walk the long ‘Nightingale’ wards – Florence Nightingale had not only founded its school of nursing but was influential in the design of the building – and learned to avoid prayer-time because the way out was obstructed by the line of ‘Nightingales’ kneeling at the door in order of seniority ...”

“... of Lancelot and Guinevere to the European imagination. In the English imagination they powered Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Morte D’Arthur, created the Victorian vogue for William Morris’s ‘Defence of Guenevere’ (1858) and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-85), and returned in T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958) and the Disney movie ...”

“... as patriotic as any other old Etonian from Somersetshire. The text of the leaflet is reprinted in Hugh Thomas’s biography of Strachey published twenty years ago. Thomas told us much more about Strachey the man (cricket, tennis, adoring family, etc) than about Strachey the socialist. This is perhaps because ...”

“... so confidently, we know too. It hardly matters that in his delightful and learned introduction Hugh Haughton fails to make the obvious distinction between nonsense poetry and special sense poetry. His spaciously ecumenical anthology includes both, and in so doing gives a variety of different glimpses and different pleasures. It so happens that the only ...”

“... of drink. There was Robert Burns, after all, and his skirling, birling Tam O’Shanter. There was Hugh MacDiarmid and his drunk man looking at the thistle. And there were all those Scots poets meeting in Milne’s Bar in Edinburgh, pouring whisky down their necks and poison in one another’s ears, yet homeward-bound at the end of it all to beat their ...”

“... for which Italy provided ample opportunities, were, as a rule, politely veiled. The painter Thomas Patch, who had been expelled from Rome for pederasty, spent the rest of his life happily in Florence untroubled by the authorities. He was described by William Patoun simply and bluntly as ‘a—’. In Genoa, however, a certain Richard Creswell was ...”

“... WHO estimate of 7 May) – but, on balance, the similarity is not all bad news. The epidemiologist Thomas Mack concluded a review of post-1949 smallpox in Europe by saying that the virus ‘cannot be said to live up to its reputation. Far from being a quick-footed menace, it has appeared as a plodding nuisance with more bark than bite.’ The successful ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”

“... American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this Macphcrson’s texts have been ignored for much of this century, partly because ...”

“... trees, like the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn that flowered on Christmas Day. The Puritan preacher Hugh Peter wanted to pull down Stonehenge, and the 18th-century Baptist Thomas Robinson boasted that he had ‘killed’ 40 stones at Avebury with his own hands. But, like the radicals who proposed that all churches and ...”

“... the English branch of Amnesty, and, last but not least, the British Parliament. The historian Hugh Thomas had put forward to the House of Lords a motion asking the Cuban Government that Valladares be set free. This is the same Lord Thomas who in his history of Cuba wrote that the New York Times – specifically, an ...”

“... looks more like a cow wearing a lizard mask. It is being ridden by a man wielding an axe. Hugh of St Victor claimed that the inhabitants of ‘Meroe’ in the Nile domesticated ‘cocodrillios’ and rode them across the river. Other creatures are entirely unmoored from reality, like the manticore, which supposedly has a ‘triple set of teeth, the ...”