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“... man became agricultural and technological, and built an economic base. As Prometheus says in Tony Harrison’s eponymous 1998 film-poem, Before I came men would be found in sunless dwellings underground. They saw no difference between the winter and the springtime scene. Without me Man would not now know the earth and all that lies below, underground ...”

“... of mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à ...”

“... 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed north); nevertheless, Koolhaas calls it, with Corbusierian hyperbole, ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western ...”

“... human instincts and created ‘a moral wasteland and a land of hatred’. In The New Emperors, Harrison Salisbury included over a dozen index references to ‘Mao as emperor’. Mr Salisbury made the most of Mao’s half-mocking comparisons between himself and the first Qin emperor (221-210 BC) who ‘burnt the books and killed the scholars’; and claimed ...”

“... the beheading of Charles I. In October 1660, he ‘went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.’ Pepys had no hesitation in ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... Virgin Mary, who took care of me … Fight with Hope devastating. Only person I had then was Uncle John who was rarely there or sober. The disillusion when he hit the kid and dog was Awful for me. The year or so left was lonely hell. Only reason i’m telling you this is that i know i have dealt with these few years ad nauseum. Problem is everytime I am ...”

“... as the youngest son. He reproduced this situation in Lucretia (1846), in which the heir of the St John’s Laughton estate marries the heiress of Vernon Grange. ‘Two sons were born. To the elder was destined his father’s inheritance – to the younger the maternal property. One house is not large enough for two heirs. Nothing could exceed the pride of the ...”

“... obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on which male identity is enacted, as well as a form of ...”

“... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... seedy urban living to replace the laboured machinery of detection. The kind of murder mystery that John Peacock unravels in Attard in Retirement could in principle have been offered at any time since radio began – though Peacock, a workmanlike writer, scatters Smileyesque detail about, presumably to reassure the listener that he has not really been wasting ...”

“... when a gathering enemy offensive threatened the money’s security. The third is The Long March by Harrison Salisbury (1985), which says similarly that Zemin took part in hiding the Red Army’s money and treasure in a mountain cave for two years until it was removed shortly before the Long March and divided among the Communist armies that were about to set ...”

“... to, almost, the present day, each one made to stand for a particular type of donnish character: John Henry Newman (‘The Charismatic Don’); Maurice Bowra (‘The Don as Wit’); George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme ...”