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“... hand, was genuinely strange. A high-wire walker who is artist in residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, he is described, with a simpering smile from Dr Guntern, as conquistador of the useless. Petit is a tiny, frail man who looks like a haggard Jean-Louis Barrault. He offers magic tricks and his offences against the social norms to the ...”

“... most part independently) on the remorselessly scholarly study by Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D.E.P. Jackson. It is a careful and sensible work, with no illusions about 12th-century Islamic politics, but its conclusion is that the high Western opinion of Saladin was substantially justified. Newby is at his best on Islam, and the habitually ignorant Westerner ...”

“... individuals. Their selection includes some familiar names, such as George Washington and Andrew Jackson, and some surprising ones, including Samuel de Champlain, who did more than anyone to create the French empire in 17th-century North America, and Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Mexican leader who suffered defeat both in the Texas War for Independence ...”

“... was only a partial truth. ‘Today seems to be a good day to remind everyone,’ tweeted Dominique Jackson, a (Democratic) Colorado state representative, ‘that the electrical grid in Texas was deregulated, privatised, and then removed from interconnected networks to avoid federal regulation or renewable energy options and to increase profits to a small ...”

“... Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us ...”

“... European male) and the neologism ‘freshpeople’ were giggled over at dinner parties. Jesse Jackson visited the campus and was greeted by five hundred students chanting ‘Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Western Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it sounded more ominous than that). William Bennett, Secretary for Education, also came to visit the ...”

“... John Searle is known primarily for his extensive writings in the philosophy of language, but in recent years he has published some celebrated iconoclastic essays in the philosophy of mind. His ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, for example, challenged the fundamental assumption in artificial intelligence that cognition can be re-created by the manipulation of physical symbols according to a formal program ...”

“... McMichael has a fine delicate touch in brief evocative lyrics and can open out into longer forms. John Matthias at his best achieves a steady tone, a dense texture, a clear focus on complex material. And in some of Robert Pinsky’s poems (‘Sadness and Happiness’, for example) there is a momentum, a sense of invention and of language rushing ...”

“... was the dominant institution during slavery, and for at least a short period after emancipation. John Blessingame followed this more optimistic line of argument even further in The Slave Community, detailing a rich variety of African cultural patterns which had survived the shocks of slavery. These Conflicting learned opinions were not part of an arid debate ...”

“... was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the reader who is reading ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... concert pianist) and painting. He was assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ...”

“... Convention was a glamorous performance. But at one point, trying to reproach the Democrats with John Adams’s phrase ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he slipped and declared instead: ‘Facts are stupid things.’ At the moment he wished to invoke an intransigent, incontrovertible reality which would supposedly confound his enemies and bear out the ...”

“... in the same way that he both displayed and disowned his feelings. His singular love for Moses Jackson, who went to India, and whose brother Adalbert died of typhoid, is now well-known: but while it may have made him fail his Oxford exams, it remains the most obvious part of his mystery, even though the most touching one. Less accountable is Housman’s ...”

“... that he wasn’t ultimately able to take of the man who was the love of his life, Moses Jackson. But the scholarship was not a substitute, or some kind of embittered retreat: it was another way of doing a similar thing. Accuracy was a form of love for Housman; and love always exposes one’s incompetence. The notion of producing an authoritative ...”