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“... a Columbus who was both prophet and profiteer. The lesson is salutary: Columbus’s religion may have started as an affectation before it became an intense conviction. He was, after all, a professional salesman and natural rhetorician, who had an infallible trick of telling potential backers what they wanted to hear. He had thoroughly rumbled the ...”

“... to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel Farber’s books have at least one eye on the present. Carwardine focuses on Lincoln’s relationship to different kinds of power – political, military and moral, and the power of public opinion and religious enthusiasm in an ...”

“... better than it looks, and on the other, that Nazi architecture is profoundly bad, however good it may look. When he was young, Krier argued that it was the melancholy duty of every architect of principle to give up any idea of building at all. ‘A responsible architect cannot possibly build today … Building can only mean a greater or smaller degree of ...”

“... He was a finely ironic self-dramatist, too, scheduling the first trial of Airship No. 2 for 11 May 1899 – the Feast of the Ascension. Paris, unsurprisingly, adored him. In 1901, at the height of his fame, a newspaper described him as the city’s ‘god’, and noted the homophony between his name and those of Porthos and Athos. Milliners created a ...”

“... In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of business. The episode is undated in the book, but took place some time before the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, at which time DiMaggio was 74 ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb ...”

“... the law. And, having lived lives generally presumed to have been even shadier than they were, they may well be immortalised as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies ...”

“... say, either to themselves or to the other characters present, and what sorts of thing Shakespeare may not have quite been able to say, whether for reasons of political prudence (of which he had great store) or because it was not quite possible to say them within the mental world in which he operated. In different phases of Shakespeare’s career and in ...”

“... two terms in residence). I never saw him perform as an actor, earliest of his incarnations, but we may have run across each other in pre-war days, when (as he records in Who’s Who) he was working as office-boy, like myself, in a publishing firm. In the war he had been with the Coldstream (adjutant to a Guards battalion can have been no rest-cure, though ...”

“... rates; and if you don’t discharge her to a tittle of your agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live ... Credit is too wary, too coy a lady to stay with any people upon mean conditions; if you will entertain this virgin, you must act upon the nice principles of honour and without any respect to parties – if this is not ...”

“... of the Ribbentrop-Molotov hyphen, while it is true that men like Mikhail Suslov and Mao Tse-tung may have gone to their graves thinking of the Leninist state as history exemplified, it is not believable that Edvard Gierek or Milos Jakes or any of the other ‘Vodka-Cola’ general secretaries (Erich Honecker partially exempted) thought anything of the ...”

“... marks your position in society, and that saying or doing the Right Thing at the Right Time may keep you in the conversation long enough to be remembered by the Right People. One senses that all these Gilberts want somehow to remain outside of the Inside, free to believe that they can remain superior to those they are seeking to emulate. They are ...”

“... straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are narrated by characters who may be cagey, volatile, fanciful, captious, even self-deceiving. In the past, John Fuller has been a cunning contriver of riddles on a small scale, but here the design is grander. The verse is protean and the reader, like Neoptolemos, must grapple with fickle ...”

“... to challenge the sentimental and moralistic pictures of working-class community associated with Richard Hoggart, Jeremy Seabrook and Steedman’s particular mentor, Raymond Williams. The childhood Steedman described was not cosy and hospitable but lonely, introverted and largely joyless. Her mother, a Lancashire weaver’s daughter, had fought against ...”

“... had not gone far into his Homer before he hoped that somebody would hang him, and the same wish may well have filled Mr Raban’s bosom: the subject is so enormous and it has been considered time out of mind from so many points of view – physical, metaphysical, oceanographical, navigational, as a place for battle, swimming, fishing, drowning, shipwreck ...”