Search Results

“... crimes violated. The persuasiveness of the argument that capital punishment is too blunt and too savage – more than is necessary to ensure the safety of the community, less than is needed to prevent similar crimes in the future – depends to some extent on the answer to an empirically decidable question: does the death penalty, as opposed to other ways of ...”

“... More than three centuries ago. Sir Thomas Browne noted ‘the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present’. He added that these nostalgic declaimers seem always to have been present, and indeed one can find notable examples of them from virtually all periods of human history ...”

“... victory and fully aware of the potency of the Falklands factor, Tory politicians like Lord Hugh Thomas, the distinguished historian of Spain and Cuba, see the task of historians as the creation of a usable past which will confirm the version of history peddled in the popular press, furnish yet another justification of their claim to authority and boost the ...”

“... they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was considering the dietary prohibitions in the Bible, he was puzzled that griffins were listed, commenting that griffins were ‘Poetical Animals, and things of no existence’. The combination of eagle and lion was, he wrote, ‘monstrous’ and ...”

“... classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas Gataker who refused a Cambridge doctorate because ‘like Cato the censor he would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was ...”

“... of the Corbett family, ‘who were murdered During the Massacre of the Christians in Delhi’; to Thomas Collins and no fewer than 23 members of his extended family, ‘all barbarously murdered at Delhi on or about the 11th of May 1857’; to Dr Chimmun Lall, a ‘native Christian and a Worshipper in this Church’, who ‘fell a martyr to his faith on the ...”

“... 16th century equivalent of the flying picket made its appearance, and then as now, it provoked a savage reaction on the part of those in authority: pathetic fantasies like those of Bartholemew Steere in Oxfordshire were blown up into imaginary rebellions, couched in the vocabulary of class war, and judges showed their usual ingenuity in expanding the scope ...”

“... who employed him, and borrowed money he had no hope of repaying. His criticism was notable for savage attacks made on contemporaries, but when challenged he often denied writing them. He accused Longfellow and others of plagiarism, yet himself lifted chunks of prose from journals and encyclopedias. Although priding himself on unflinching personal ...”

“... gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.’ Hahn has it that Colonel Thomas Pride killed the bears of Southwark with his own hands, but other accounts say he had them tied by the noses and shot by militiamen. On his deathbed he is supposed to have said: ‘The first thing that is upon my spirits is the killing of the bears, for ...”

“... Greece still held cultural sway over its new imperial master: ‘Conquered Greece conquered the savage victor.’ By Plutarch’s time, a Greek renaissance had taken hold in the Roman Empire, producing such writers as the ‘golden-mouthed’ orator Dion of Prusa, and Lucian, who imagined going to the moon centuries before Jules Verne thought of it. ‘I ...”

“... paintings (especially the Madonna della Sedia) and had been adopted in famous paintings by Thomas Lawrence and Ingres. Moreover, the style of Brown’s painting owes nothing to Botticelli. It does, however, owe something to the example of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, with its central convex mirror, which had been acquired by the National Gallery in ...”

“... least pretence of a break with colonial rule. Streets and roads bear the names of some of the most savage grandees of the empire – Havelock, Neill, Outram. The bicentennial of 2019 celebrated the arrival of the city-state’s ‘founding father’, Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, whose name graces countless schools and ...”

“... shots of places and persons, no violence. They helped create the myth of the Noble American Savage even as they were documenting his suppression, just as Muybridge’s Yosemite views were promoting the savage beauty of the American wilderness while his shots of miners and railroad workers were recording its demolition ...”

“... Before the last presidential election, no other candidate, Bernie Sanders included, was so savage in his reckoning of America’s recent foreign ventures. ‘A complete waste,’ he called the country’s longest war. ‘Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there.’ Nor has any other president in recent memory ...”

“... friends have verified it. Thus, as often happens with US fiction (remember the rumours that Thomas Pynchon was really J.D. Salinger under another name?), attention is deflected away from the substantive matter of the novel, and onto various gee-whizz discussions of supposedly Post-Modernist authorial behaviour – the adult version of the ...”