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“... for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon ...”

“... Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves ...”

“... best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of ...”

“... it seemed, was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling ...”

“... out for thanks twice. Rowbotham also thanks Robin Blackburn, who, we understand, is to review Richard Gott’s new book, In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chávez and the Transformation of Venezuela (Verso, 246 pp., £16, 1 July, 1 85984 775 7) for the New Statesman. Again, it has not gone unnoticed at the LRB that ‘Robin Blackburn at ...”

“... proudly displayed (as are the many builders’ cracks in the drawing), Barry Fantoni, Nick Newman, Martin Honeysett, Willie Rushton … the list is long. Most of this, including the strips, is topical, socio-comic work, or lunatic observational – the country seen from another planet – or simply anarchic. Scarfe and Steadman, the two high executioners, were ...”

“... superficial dreamers – people like Edward Bellamy, Henry George, H.G. Wells, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King. These are the people who dangle carrots before democratic societies by suggesting concrete ways in which things might get better – become more democratic, fairer, more open, more egalitarian, more decent. They supply local hope, not ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... having suffered a stroke, died in bed at his rectory; and where, half a century later, Pope Martin V had his bones exhumed, burned, and the ashes thrown into the River Swift. Leicestershire folklore maintained that on the spot where one of the bones being carried to the fire fell, a spring of pure water spontaneously emerged, and became known as St ...”

“... witty criticisms of recent exclusions by natural scientists into sociobiology, such as those of Richard Dawkins, the behaviour of whose selfish gene is compared with that of a successful Chicago gangster. Ross’s book is marred, however, by its advocacy of the least compelling of all forms of ecological thought – the ‘post-scarcity’ tradition of ...”

“... he interviewed live philosophers and dead ones (the latter mediated by other live ones). The late Martin Milligan was a talented philosopher, one who was blind, not from birth but early in life. Magee, with characteristic panache, had a splendid idea: let’s get at some philosophical issues about perception by pursuing a dialogue. The resulting exchange of ...”

“... ironically, starting with the jackalopes and the women who love them.And who, precisely, is Agnes Martin? Her semi-obscurity is exactly the point. True, her paintings now reside in all the fabled modern collections and sell for millions of dollars. True, like O’Keeffe she lived near Taos and Santa Fe for much of her life. But she remains a cult figure ...”

“... of Defense. Along with technicians and scientists from Boeing, Raytheon, IBM and Lockheed Martin, other attendees included one of the founders of the journal Metaphor and Symbol and the author of the metaphor article in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. IARPA, which was founded in 2007, is now based in a sparkling new facility at the ...”

“... down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank ...”

“... of mental reservation, which was most fully developed in this period by the Spanish author Martin de Azpilcueta, otherwise known as Dr Navarrus, whose casuistical Handbook for Confessors and Penitents first appeared in 1549 and had gone through 81 editions by 1625. In his commentary on a chapter in Gratian’s Decretum, Navarrus clearly assumed that ...”