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“... rule, tens of thousands more have been disclosed to the Undercover Policing Inquiry chaired by Sir John Mitting. The inquiry was ordered in 2015 by Theresa May, then home secretary, after it was revealed that the police had spied on the family and friends of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in Eltham in South-East London in 1993 in a racist attack by a gang ...”

“... at the National Gallery from October until January – The Quintet of the Astonished, which took as a starting point Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Mocked, was much admired when it was shown there in 2000. The clarity and sharpness of the images on the screen in which heads changed in slow motion – so slow that it ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written specimens weren’t in the least clumsy. This couldn’t be said of the play’s dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such ...”

“... had begun to seem even to him a long war against the doctrinaire in literature. Against what he took to be the prevailing modern orthodoxy of Symbolist poetry – ‘the main rule is that a poet must never say what he wants to say directly . . . he must invent a way of hinting at it by metaphors, which are then called images’ – he promoted what he ...”

“... that they can’t be solved? Proposing the reform of London’s local government in the Commons, John Prescott expressed Labour’s desire to make the city’s administration ‘more open, more accountable and more inclusive ... It is about modernising the government of the capital, and giving power to the people of London.’ The city does need to regain ...”

“... amassing a huge fortune as a royal servant, it is certainly unlikely. Apsley’s mother was a St John, from an elder branch of the same family as Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St John, whose daughter married Apsley’s cousin Sir Walter St John, denounced by his Royalist opponents ...”

“... so great a claim to the gratitude of his country’. Less than two years later an ex-colleague, John Cam Hobhouse, commented: ‘I am surprised how, by mere fluency of speech and arrogance of manner, this really inferior man has contrived to lead a great party, and to connect his name imperishably with the most splendid triumphs of British ...”

“... would conclude that legislation in this area was a mistake, a view expressed on television by Sir John Wheeler, Conservative chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs – if so, those hopes were disappointed. Why were the terms of reference so narrow in any case? Discussion about the effectiveness of anti-discrimination legislation, as the report ...”

“... for being captured 13 times and 17 times sold into slavery, going from the Ethiopia of Prester John to the Japan of the Daimyos and St Francis Xavier? Some say that he was a prodigy, as well as one of the great Portuguese classics, the prose equivalent of Camoens; others say that he was a liar. Rebecca Catz says that he was a satirist, that his whole ...”

“... final version will come into effect at the beginning of next year. There had been worries about John Whittingdale, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, and the plans he might have for the BBC, but the organisation envisioned in the White Paper isn’t vastly different from the BBC as we know it. The £3.7 billion from the licence fee will ...”

“... archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys? Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the ...”

“... his poems, though, that while in the East he chased up images of Buddha with what his biographer John Haffenden calls ‘a learned amateur interest amounting to an obsession’. The offhand phrase about Marvell is a bit of English disguise: camouflaged passion rather than easy generality. Empson taught literature in Japan from 1931 to 1934, and in China from ...”

“... writer), and a tiring friend, because he wanted to talk and to drink all night. Lévi-Strauss took in the ideas, but without the vodka – this proved a let-down to his exuberant associate. Jakobson lived, taught and published in the United States for forty more years after this, first at Columbia and later at Harvard. He made constant raids out of ...”

“... which her lover made it clear that he visited her only for occasional ‘relief’. Presently she took off for Paris, and he yearned to follow her, when he could find the money, to establish a proper romantic liaison. Before he could get there, however, after the gambling episode at Baden, Apollinaria had fallen into the arms of a handsome young Spanish ...”