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“... the prosecutions and executions continued to follow the old, more haphazard pattern. Matthew Hopkins, in 1645, rounded up large numbers of suspects, tortured them by keeping them awake or starving them, and obtained confessions of satanic pacts and sexual intercourse with the fiend. It is no coincidence that the Doctor Faustus story came to England from ...”

“... and acoustics are extraordinarily nimble, but can even so be seen as tricksy. A late poem by James Merrill, from the collection A Scattering of Salts, receives a brilliant and enjoyable decoding here, as the body shapes in the word ‘body’ are revealed in a poem set out with a head and shoulders and torso, the o ‘like a little kohl-rimmed ...”

“... case of a prejudice shared in varying degrees by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as ...”

“... mutton and potatoes under it’ on which the company is feasting in The Pickwick Papers while Jack Hopkins tells the story of the child who swallowed a necklace. Dickens couldn’t stop sensing. ‘His imagination overwhelms everything,’ Orwell concluded, ‘like a kind of weed.’ But it isn’t enough to notice him noticing. Dickens did a great deal more ...”

“... on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee Boggs.Cruse had been recruited in response to increasing discontent among Black students at the university. The publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967 had turned ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”

“... could count major cultural figures among his friends – Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte and James Fenimore Cooper, for instance. Others he kept at a slight distance. Having done time with the notorious bore Hawthorne, he had the wit to remark: ‘Last night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said ...”

“... Moore and her mother finished her in Brooklyn (decorum studies?) after she left Vassar. James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, publisher and friend of Ezra Pound, was so desperate to publish her that even after he accepted he wasn’t going to be allowed to, he still hoped at least to be permitted to announce that he was. The alpha males – and ...”

“... now admired, though not for their technical stunts, have gone in for ‘experiment’, from James, Ford and Conrad and Joyce to, say, Golding and Ian McEwan. Lawrence saw how much might be done in a novel, how free it could be of constraints, how apt to the business of making it new; the novel was protean, insisting on its own virtually infinite ...”

“... if the demoniac were exposed as fraudulent. This did indeed happen on several occasions under King James, who appears to have been much influenced by Harsnett’s views, and such exposures must have had a considerable effect on attitudes to witchcraft in general. The point might in fact be extended further, to include the activities of witch-finders like ...”

“... Price’s star was also on the rise; a very young associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, he had been profiled by Life magazine on account of his research into vaccines for Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other rickettsial infections. He had recently signed a contract with the Department of ...”

“... In the early 1860s, Bradley and her widowed mother joined the household of Emma and her husband, James Cooper. Edith, the Coopers’ daughter, had been born in 1862; three years later, following the birth of another girl, Emma withdrew into a shadowy life of invalidism. The 18-year-old Bradley – strong, confident and hungry for responsibility – took care ...”

“... the effects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for the head of the agency, Harry Hopkins; fifty years later in Britain, she watched the gap between the rich and the poor widen again, and she railed against the spirit of Thatcherism. Two days before she died, at the age of 89, she was denouncing the Clinton Administration’s plans, with ...”

“... for it. Yet she fills a necessary space in a mind that is ravenous for conviction. It is as if Hopkins had fallen in love at the moment of ‘the terrible sonnets’, and his poems, instead of being ‘cries like dead letters sent/To dearest him who lives, alas, away’, became cries to the loved one which neither relieved nor resolved his fear of the ...”

“... the grave. Also excluded from the original edition were, for example, William Jardine and Sir James Matheson, the founders of the famous company which bear their name. Their refusal to agree to Chinese requests to desist from the opium trade led to the disgraceful Opium War of 1840-2, a war which Jardine suggested could be brought to an end by a simple ...”