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“... to react in a particular way to political issues. In 1841, Jews were encouraged to vote for Lord John Russell (a Whig) because he was in favour of Jewish Emancipation – he won by nine votes. The Jewish vote, clearly, could be mobilised and put to good use. The Liberals put up five Jewish candidates at the next election, including David Salomons (who ...”

“... in office. For twenty years after 1846, Liberal government was kept on the road not just by Lord John Russell and Palmerston but by their two most reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but ...”

“... so British universities. Aware of their publicly-ratified superiority, this élite, the so-called Russell Group of universities, has begun to lobby for special status. As a founder member, Derek Roberts, Provost of UCL, puts it, ‘we recognise we are different – or we force everyone to be the same. Either we have an élite of about ten, or we face ...”

“... and in a higher rhetorical style than is favoured by either. At its best, as in the essays on John Stow and William Camden, the method can produce work that is very vivid. Occasionally, the reader may be left wondering whether the vividness of the writing takes it a little bit further than the words of its source, or, as in the interesting essay on the ...”

“... in the biographies of Eliot’s London friends and associates. From Ray Monk’s Life of Bertrand Russell, or Hermione Lee’s of Virginia Woolf, or Miranda Seymour’s of Ottoline Morrell, there comes an abundance and, in its repetitiveness, an overabundance of testimony about Vivienne’s or Tom’s nervous as well as physical collapses, about financial ...”

“... Marxists have discovered, is pride in knowing your place and respecting your superiors. John Osborne’s autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981) is a sustained assault on that attitude in general and his mother in particular. It is no accident that, as Taylor quotes John Vincent saying, Margaret Thatcher was ...”

“... his homosexuality. His autobiography is not coy about his attraction to men. His biographer, John McCormick, concludes that he was homosexual, but for sound social and personal reasons unwilling to risk what was in his day at best a precarious preference. To that repression, McCormick attributes the distant tone of Santayana’s writing, especially his ...”

“... way which led to damnation. This was why, at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, new churchmen like John Howson were able to complain that their fellow Protestants were turning churches into schools: when Reformers and Catholics talked about worship, they were often not talking about the same thing. It was not that Protestants were indifferent to the appeal to ...”

“... advocated, and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public ...”

“... told they had ‘set all the town together by the ears, which is the true office of a Puritan’. John White, the patriarch of Dorchester, and his allies, got a touring company of players banned, only to be attacked as a ‘counterfeit company and pack of Puritans’. It is one of the skills of this book that it encourages sympathy with both sides in the ...”

“... In​ a more just universe, Russell Hoban would be widely celebrated as the author of one of the most ambitious novels of the later 20th century: Riddley Walker (1980). Miserably, though, in much of the English-reading world – including the US, where he was born – he remains best known for his children’s books about Frances the Badger ...”

“... In 1738 John Rocque, a Frenchman, began his survey of London. His map (engraved by John Pine) covers an area from Marylebone and Chelsea in the west to Stepney and Deptford in the east. It was finally published in 1747. Pasted together, its 24 sheets measure 13 x 6 ½ feet – that is how it is shown in the exhibition London 1753 at the British Museum until 23 November ...”

“... it takes up themes from Derrida’s previous writing, notably from Limited Inc, his exchange with John Searle on the topic (supposedly) of speech-act philosophy; and that Signsponge is perhaps his most extravagant text to date, judged by all the normal, reputable standards of literary-critical practice. But having said all this one has really done no more ...”

“... talking to a Grundig TK46 tape recorder, so his life story was doled out in reels, not chapters. Russell Banks found these reels, he tells us, in the basement of the public library in St Cloud, Florida. It was 1999, and Hurricane Irene (‘I rain’) had just barrelled through, flooding the town and rubbishing library materials. ‘The Magic Kingdom’ was ...”

“... long afterwards the producer died suddenly and that was that. The scarlet Woolsack, described by John Wells as ‘a sofa sacred to the law’, plays a sit-on part throughout this book. Though periodically restuffed with Commonwealth wool, it retains all the ‘ritual magic’ of medieval days. During the Gordon Riots of 1780 it was the holy refuge on which ...”