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“... Walsingham Priory in Norfolk (minus its famous shrine of Our Lady); his northern Protestant client Robert Ferrar advocated for his own Nostell Priory in Yorkshire as a new preaching centre and school. Abbot Sagar of Hailes Abbey imagined his house to have a future like Walsingham, as a college purged of its cult object of Christ’s blood. Among religious ...”

“... are told) that the Tories were trying to destroy his life, and who attempted an assassination of Robert Peel, the word ‘paranoia’ was never used. Instead, and tellingly, M’Naghten was found insane on grounds of homicidal mania. This must be one of the most famous cases of conspiracy theory in the psychiatric and legal literature, and it is interesting ...”

“... laid to rest. This was the great insight of another of Durkheim’s students, Robert Hertz: the funeral is a ritual not so much of transition as of separation – ending the earthly existence of the corpse. Proper burial and a proper naming of the dead allows them to go in peace, to be forgotten in Nietzsche’s sense that memory depends ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... in a sense voluntary, the final sacrifice of men who offered their lives and integrity as a last service to the cause they loved. Was it really like that? Only a few days ago, I met a Gulag survivor who insisted that Koestler had been correct ‘absolutely, in every detail’ about the motives of those victims who admitted the absurd charges of espionage and ...”

“... breathe not his name!’ was the song by Thomas Moore, the name being that of the patriot Robert Emmet, executed after leading the 1803 rebellion, who asked that his epitaph remain unwritten until his country had taken its place among the nations of the earth. High speech and silence, this was the patriotic way, and no silence more urgent than that of ...”

“... enjoins everyone to refrain from dogmatism. Though unable to refrain from a hefty side-swipe at Robert Kagan’s Martians, Soros generally abides by his own rules. Thus a liberal concept of human nature is saved, albeit by a curious exaltation of indeterminacy. In his introduction, Todd says that the most disturbing thing about the present situation is ...”

“... backwardness of the French countryside down to Bloch’s own time.Some fifty years later, Robert Brenner was to develop the kernel of Bloch’s insight into a magisterial comparative analysis of the variant property relations thrown up by class struggles on the land across Europe, and their consequences for the development of agrarian capitalism ...”

“... the seafood market was shaky. In an interview in April with CGTN, China’s international state TV service, Zhang Jixian, the head of respiratory medicine at Hubei Provincial Hospital, explained that her first three Covid-19 cases, admitted on 26 and 27 December, were members of the same family, parents and son, living together. None had any connection to the ...”

“... feeling were threatened by crazy prophets who were acquiring disastrously wide influence – by Robert Knox, the anatomist who published in 1850 a book. The Races of Man, which identified black people as natural slaves, and by Thomas Carlyle, whose ravings about ‘the Nigger Question’ came out around the same time. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, as presented ...”

“... of TfL, and Johnson has declared – in a deliberate lie – that Khan has ‘bankrupted’ the service. In fact, the major cause of TfL’s woes is its reliance on passenger fares for 72 per cent of its funding, after a deal between George Osborne and Johnson, towards the end of his stint as mayor, slashed its central funding by £700 million. The ...”

“... working on the intelligence base in Kagnew, which in the 1960s became an attractive alternative to service in Vietnam: now well into retirement, the men talk frankly, often comically, about life on the base, their sexual forays into Asmara, binge drinking or drinking to near-extinction, and occasionally about the nationalist politics of which they got a faint ...”

“... when he finally reached No. 10.’ It is thus a pity and an irony that of all Macmillan’s service in that war the only bit that is much remembered is the tragic finale: the handing over of Cossacks and White Russians and Croats at Klagenfurt in May 1945. The appalling consequences of this decision – thousands of men, women and children were ...”

“... evidence procured by Finn and Couvée, went largely unreported in the West. Long forgotten is Robert Conquest’s The Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair, published in 1961, as impartial an account as you could expect from someone who had been employed in the Foreign Office’s propaganda shop for more than a decade. Add to these Evgeny Pasternak’s ...”

“... the Sun in 1969, after he’d bought the News of the World from the Carr organisation, defeating Robert Maxwell en route. The News of the World is a Sunday paper, so it was a point of elementary commercial logic to start a daily paper to accompany it, in order that the presses would not lie idle during the week. Larry Lamb, the Sun’s first ...”