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“... across a continent has a certain raffish hilarity to it and once produced a study called Dylan Thomas in America. This book is a sort of ‘Dylan Thomas in Africa’, with the difference that Breytenbach has written this one himself and cares about the continent he’s travelling through and getting drunk in. As he ...”

“... trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of absurdity. On at least two ...”

“... After a considerable pause he says: ‘I’m afraid that on this occasion I can only agree.’ Thomas Hobbes, political philosopher and inveterate royalist, has always had his admirers and loathers: from the moment his greatest work, Leviathan, was published in 1651, he has attracted reverence and spite, though rarely indifference, in equal measure. But ...”

“... is no longer there except as an intuition or perhaps a fiction: Shelley charms the star into what Thomas Hardy – a great admirer though a very different sort of poet – once called ‘existlessness’. And, to add to the sense of abstraction, this is a metaphor for a metaphor, since Shelley is likening the dwindling star to the soaring skylark, a bird ...”

“... end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s ...”

“... in the same way as Saint-Just – if they think that the virtues as described by Aristotle or St Thomas are the necessary and sufficient materials of ethical self-understanding at the end of the 20th century. There is another way in which the demands of ethical disagreement as we more ordinarily meet it may seem to call on the theory of the ultimate ...”

“... that trend cannot yet be judged, it is likely to gather strength from the important books in which Thomas Mayer and Alistair Fox examine the literature and politics of early Tudor England, especially of the reign of Henry VIII. Mayer’s concern is the literature of political theory. His study examines the ideas of ...”

“... away entirely. Korzhakov’s reward was to be head of a new security service with vastly expanded powers. Almost overnight he became a politician with his own gang, whose tentacles stretched far into the economy. Mikhail Barsukov, his friend of 17 years, was later made head of the FSB. Oleg Soskovets, a vicious manager with lucrative connections in the ...”

“... and the great clock. You could exchange a note for ready coin, cash in your dividends and more. Thomas Rowlandson’s picture of the Rotunda from 1792 is filled with a crowd of jobbers, speculators, investors and matrons, as jolly and busy a scene as Ranelagh Gardens or the music room at Vauxhall, and like those other popular venues a magnet for foreign ...”

“... The legend named Thomas Chatterton is less marvellous than the boy it glorified, and far less rich or strange than the cultural history that includes the history of the legend itself. Chatterton committed suicide in August 1770. He was not yet 18 years old. With little formal education – seven years in a provincial school, followed by less than three years as a lawyer’s apprentice – he left his native Bristol to make his way as a writer in London, where he died only four months later ...”

“... resemblance – suggested, too, in the solemn tone of the Zone Three chronicler – to an idea Thomas Mann used in his fable The Transposed Heads. A fable has to match invention to idea, and all with perfect simplicity. It would be easy to conclude that Doris Lessing isn’t as good at this as Thomas Mann. The dynastic ...”

“... and the constitution, and that this revolution was planned, legislated and executed by one man: Thomas Cromwell. He is similarly fixed in his methods. Now, as always, Elton believes in the self-sufficiency of the record. All the historian is required to do is to approach the evidence with an open mind, study it faithfully, and write up his results ...”

“... It is part of the ideal of limited government, according to which we do not hand over plenary powers to the state as a condition for being able to enjoy the benefits of a peaceful, just and orderly collective life. The preservation of liberty in the use of those ever-proliferating goods and opportunities that the state makes possible, through the legal ...”

“... his eyes, conceding he was oversensitive. But he was also hinting at the stubbornness of the powers-that-be, that rule our lives and the universe. The gods. Aeolus. Wind. Chaudhuri’s debt to Joyce could hardly be plainer, though the Bloomishness of Radhesh’s exasperating vitality is entirely unconscious on the character’s part (and they have their ...”

“... she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give their players room to move. The Letter of Marque opens with Jack Aubrey dismissed the ...”