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“... or religious (or both). Abyss-redemption, Peters says, is the argument Milton’s Satan offers to Eve to overcome her reluctance to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. ‘If what is evil/Be real, why not known, since easier shunn’d?’ There is something of it, too, in the argument of St Paul that we cannot know the law without knowing and even ...”

“... Laurence, had just shot his bird by publishing an excellent political history of Transkeiup to the eve of Independence, and wondering how he could rescue his own academic enterprise. He decided that, rather than wait a few years to write a political history of Transkei after Independence, he would pull rank as a ‘philosopher’ and say something about ...”

“... comes not from anti-clericalism but from piety: he goes to Mass at peril of his life, but in Martin Parker’s 1632 ballad, ‘A True Tale of Robin Hood’, his post-Reformation fervour leads him occasionally to castrate clergymen. His loyalty goes straight to the top; his enemy is the corrupt middle man. In order to maintain Robin as the hero of ...”

“... War. Each generation of Nedeeds has a Luther (the Christian name suggests Lucifer, rather than Martin Luther King) and he is always in charge of wedding and funeral arrangements, a solemn and forbidding master of ceremonies. The well-paced, ironic narrative, cleverly modulating into the bemused, commonsensical natter of white neighbours watching the black ...”

“... skins of the wild animals for the man and woman, dressed them. There is a pun in the Hebrew on Eve’s name and the word for ‘life’, hence Hava and have all; and smooth the way continues the play on the serpent’s speech, which Rosenberg translates as smooth-tongued, and on the human couple’s nakedness, translated as smooth-skinned. Fox translates ...”

“... Literature Association, has some plums. Of especial unforgettableness are a burst of rage from Martin Green against ‘charm’ as imbuing the Peter Pans of Barrie and of Disney; a vindication of Amy March as holding the right attitudes to art and to life – this by Anne Hollander; by Ronald Berman a perfectly ridiculous analysis of the child’s eye as ...”

“... Hollywood novels, Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon and What Makes Sammy Run?, published on the eve of US entry into the Second World War, in which ‘the moguls did not represent American Jews so much as a universal American experience.’ Schulberg, a Communist at the time he conceived his novel (although he broke with the Party as a result of its ...”

“... local businesses’ and then as ‘neighbourhood resistance to military occupation’. They quote Martin Luther King, who visited Watts at the end of the violence and encountered a young man who told him: ‘We won!’ King was baffled: ‘Thirty-some people are dead [and] all but two are Negroes. You’ve destroyed your own [businesses]. What do you ...”

“... if Milton is ignored, so, too, are the classical foundations on which his republicanism stands. As Martin Dzelzainis argues in an essay on his republicanism in the Companion, he drew on Sallust and Roman law for his account of the ennobling effects of liberty. One phrase in Milton’s History of Britain – ‘from obscure and small to grow eminent and ...”

“... packet of mail’ where I see a wrapped brie or camembert with the maker’s name, Eugene Martin, prominently displayed. It may be a parcel, of course. Without looking at the original, it is impossible to be certain, though even in reproduction the label looks printed rather than hand-printed like an address. At any rate, a parcel wouldn’t make ...”

“... Muldoon’s children’s books, The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt and The O-O’s Party, New Year’s Eve follow an alphabetic pattern, and To Ireland, I begins with the oldest Irish abecedary poet of all, the conveniently initialled Amergin. This ur-bard’s ‘Alphabet Calendar’ receives an ingenious reading in The White Goddess, Muldoon reminds us, where its ...”

“... when Falwell provocatively visited San Francisco with a battery of New Right personalities on the eve of the 1984 Democratic Convention) as the way in which both have been forced for different reasons to engage in strategies of accommodation. Castro came to terms with the outside world mainly as a result of Aids. An initial refusal to face the fact that ...”

“... lodgings in Versailles, and attended every day the debates of the newly-convened Assembly. On the eve of the Revolution, women did not regard themselves as an interest-group. Throughout the century poor women had taken to the streets in times of shortages and high prices. But few people in 1789 thought that women should be allowed to vote – or indeed, that ...”

“... Though she was lucky to get such a big advance for her apprentice manuscript – half a dozen of Martin Amis – she set about learning the tricks of the trade from those who knew better, and is still learning. This, her second book, shorter and sharper than her first, is generally a better read. Compared with The Downing Street Years, it has the more ...”

“... his Mary, a fleshly image reproduced as illusion on screen, is also the vision of a seductress, Eve all over again, whose body and speech could persuade a man to eat ... anything. As Bloch says, the story misogyny tells is repeated again and again; it’s a room with a hundred entrances and exits – different societies, different moments, different voices ...”