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“... glazes, from pearlescent creamware (called ‘Queensware’ after Queen Charlotte bought a table service) to black ‘basalt’, which was matte and sooty as a lump of coal and often painted with red figures in imitation of ancient vases. Wedgwood was always trying to make his vases seem ‘un-pot-like’, to lift them out of the earthy associations of clay ...”

“... is the effect pit bulls have on essayists. To report the affair at all was to become a nark in the service of the agents of ‘dirty realism’. Bill Sikes and his mutt looked fearsome, but they were no more implicated in the crime’s leisurely aftermath than I was. But why, at this point in our culture, do we choose to invoke the dog, the ‘prime ...”

“... a purely antiquarian urge. Post-Reformation alchemy was increasingly secularised, aligned with service to the state – it involved distilling medicines, mining, metallurgy and reforming the mint. The rich and powerful didn’t abandon hope that a lowly alchemist might yet change the world. In 1565 Elizabeth set up a Dutch alchemist in his own workshop at ...”

“... a return of sorts to the day before the meeting with Pascal, when she encountered Lucien’s uncle Robert, who may be planning something sexual for her, then a brief shower, and at last she’s off to her meeting, back in the narrative present. I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the impression that Kushner had groped her ...”

“... visit to Russia and I asked him how he was planning to go. ‘By Ribble Motors. They run a coach service to Moscow starting every night from Morecambe Pier.’ If these were lighter moments they hardly seemed so then. A nurse told us that this was the Admissions Ward where, until diagnosis could sort them out, the confused and the senile, the deranged and ...”

“... they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers ...”

“... to search for truth and justice. I have done so in the belief that I was thereby doing greater service to the army and to my country. For Picquart, blind faith in army and/or nation was the enemy of justice and truth. If he did not quite raise this opposition to the level of an abstraction, nothing makes its import clearer and more powerful than the ...”

“... to Mubarak, are Copts.) They suffer various forms of discrimination: senior positions in the civil service and the professions tend to be closed to them and churches, unlike mosques, don’t receive subsidies. They find little reassurance in the rhetoric of the Muslim Brothers – whose former General Guide, Mahdi Akef, recently declared that he would prefer a ...”

“... the infrastructure of settled agriculture and thereby deprive the enemy of food and fodder. Robert Livingston in the wars against the Plains Indians had the same idea. He set ablaze the grasslands south of the Platte River in order to destroy the material support of his semi-nomadic enemy; he was using a tactic employed by Native Americans ...”

“... monthly interest-free terms’. It’s the kind of puffing that goes with a royal jubilee dinner-service: history becomes upmarket commodity.With all that showcasing, the series is commonly referred to as the Bicentennial History. But in the strictly official sense it isn’t. The project had neither money nor endorsement from the Australian Bicentennial ...”

“... generally interests us only in other tribes; Bad Blood, the term the United States Public Health Service appropriated to represent syphilis to the largely illiterate black men who were about to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the ...”

“... and frustration. Sidney and Greville found their progress at court, and their plans for military service in Europe and exploration in the New World, blocked by a queen who could not be won to the aggressive foreign policy of their party. After Sidney’s death Greville lost his way. The news of it plunged him into months of sickness and melancholy. ‘Divide ...”

“... traders and saying, “Buy it, I don’t care what the price is, buy it,”’ one attendee told Robert Bryce. As New York closes, the announcement comes. Enron, which began by owning pipelines carrying natural gas, is going to organise the trading of ‘bandwidth’ (capacity) in pipelines that carry information, the fibre-optic cables of the Internet. At ...”

“... With us it would have to be the loo.16 February. To St Paul’s, Covent Garden and the memorial service for the actor Ben Whitrow. Mindful of similar services in the past when I haven’t heard a word, I sit halfway down the south aisle festooned in hearing aids in the lee of a plaque to Flora Robson. But someone must have taken the acoustics in hand ...”

“... utility for all serving politicians, it did look a touch obvious in point of immediate self-service. And the apparently noble injunction – to consider an ex-President as a whole man, take him in the round, take him for all in all – could rebound horribly if it meant raking up things that the country was supposed to have forgotten or forgiven. Within ...”