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“... Hawthorne on the American romance to Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne to Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase staking out the ground for American exceptionalism in the postwar United States, the problem for the writer of American fiction famously posed itself as a deficit: ‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’ (Ellison ...”

“... The American poet Alice Goodman wrote two libretti for the American minimalist composer John Adams: Nixon in China, with a text mostly in rhyming couplets, and The Death of Klinghoffer. She has also finished fresh dialogue for a Glyndebourne production of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert ...”

“... Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a train from Birmingham New Street which connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man, Hughie Callaghan, was arrested the next day in Birmingham. The ...”

“... the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing ...”

“... books, which were not commonly known at the Universities … so that when I came to Oxford, Dr Adams, now master of Pembroke College, told me, I was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there.’ But the money ran out, and he was unable to complete his degree. Long before, he had stopped attending lectures because his toes were ...”

“... unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed Britain ...”

“... bishop in front of its king. The commentators disapproved: it was too cagey. Apparently, Michael Adams had once made the move in a similar position. Deep Blue scraped a draw. The IBM programmers were chastened, and for the next game took the drastic step of reducing the bias given to grandmaster moves that hadn’t been proved to be good. They drew the ...”

“... to, and seems largely to have been created by, the tradition which has been located by Simon Adams in the field of foreign policy. There the radicals, under the successive leadership of Leicester, of Essex, of Prince Henry and of the third Earl of Pembroke, urged England towards aggressive support for international Protestantism. To note that the ...”

“... and perhaps an apology, however belated, for past intolerance. ‘We were all to blame,’ Gerry Adams is fond of saying these days, referring to all manner of atrocities, from mass slaughter to the covering up of child abuse; and, however reluctantly, one must agree with him. What the pre-1916 vivid-faced idealists would have made of ‘Dev’s ...”

“... Europe were a source of Soviet weakness, not strength. By November 1949, he was citing John Quincy Adams’s line that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. He was also changing his attitude towards nuclear weapons. In ‘The International Control of Atomic Energy’, a 79-page paper commissioned in 1950 by Dean Acheson, the secretary ...”

“... repressive figure of Joachim – though it does help one to understand the shock-waves caused by Richard Strauss, rocking the boat with solecisms, crudities, reckless infringements of instrumental propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... in the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon in 1783. Nature needed no exaggeration either. As Douglas Adams once said, ‘isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’ That was in 1979 – but it was possible to think the same thing in 1579.There were many areas of religious ...”

“... and authorship in the past thirty years. Very good entries on Law (Ross Cranston), Culture (Richard White) and on K.R. Murdoch (David Bowman) are exceptions to the general level. Even granting their own terms – those of closed and authoritative, rather than open and provisional history – the Dictionary and chronology could be much more ...”

“... it exhibits, whether it takes the form of mistranslated Propertius or chopped up bits of John Adams or baffling Chinese ideograms, but its bewildering dependence on other literary sources to get going. A tiny early poem, ‘On His Own Face in a Glass’, from Pound’s first collection, A Lume Spento (1908), gestures somewhat melodramatically towards his ...”