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“... merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ‘imbecile’), preferred to leave the world rather than to understand or ...”

“... sought to give the semblance of landed life, the illusion of a great mansion in the midst of a broad-acred estate. But none of these houses was the centre of a self-contained, self-sufficient economic unit; nor were they rooted securely and socially in their locality. The estates were rarely of more than a thousand acres and were more likely to be used for ...”

“... When Toho Studios released Gojira in November 1954, Japanese audiences, according to William Tsutsui, watched its scenes of destruction ‘in respectful silence, sometimes leaving the theatres in tears’. Gojira – or Godzilla, as he came to be known in English – was a fire-breathing dinosaur played by a man in a latex suit, but his destruction of Tokyo wasn’t played for laughs ...”

“... of this. Sir John Troutbeck, one of the two Ambassadors of the Fifties examined in the chapter by William Roger Louis, was outspokenly crit ical of the immense social gaps, and in his view Western education had only made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded politically; his successor. Sir Martin Wright, that most proconsular of post-war British ...”

“... he was impressed by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from ...”

“... blue, cobalt, violet ... we can hardly doubt that something meaningful is intended. But what? William Boyd’s title is inspired by Wallace Stevens’s enigmatic ‘Landscape with Boat’ (quoted epigraphically): He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air. He ...”

“... scientists are generally warier about making prescriptions than they were in the days of William Shockley, the physicist and advocate of eugenics – at the unpardonable end of the spectrum – and Linus Pauling, the chemist and Vitamin C enthusiast, at the nutty end. Their efforts now go towards proving that they know everything there is to know ...”

“... period by the Victorians. Yet if we avoid regimented definitions it can be useful shorthand for a broad religious movement to which Donne’s sermons belonged, and which the long historiographical emphasis on the opposing tendency of Puritanism has obscured from a general readership. Within Protestant limits it valued ritual and delighted in organs and ...”

“... social prestige even though in a country like Australia there is much less prejudice against a ‘broad’ Australian accent among persons with other claims to eminence, when they speak on radio or television. It is no longer regarded as a compliment, even in England, for someone to be told that he doesn’t talk like an Australian, any more than it would be ...”

“... was increasingly thought to exercise ‘a softening and civilising influence’ on male manners. William Alexander argued in his History of Women (1779) that the rank … and condition in which we find women in any country mark out to us with the greatest precision the exact point in the scale of civil society to which the people of such country have ...”

“... immigrants found guilty of robbing and murdering a factory paymaster and a security guard in broad daylight in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The reasons for concern in the case of Guantánamo are clear enough. The assertion that the US was not bound by any law with respect to the indefinite detention of foreign nationals not surprisingly had a powerful ...”

“... children of Austrian peasants instead of getting himself elected to a Cambridge fellowship? C.D. Broad, chief fixer of the philosophy faculty at Cambridge, was prepared to admit that the Tractatus had been a significant book in its time, but said he had always disliked its literary pretentions, summing up his concerns with a donnish quip about bright young ...”

“... and remained a champion.Purdy was born in Ohio in 1914, the second of three sons. His father, William, was a banker unwisely turned property developer. After William lost large sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful ...”

“... work to which Collinson supplies both a corrective interpretation and a sociological dimension – William Haller unblushingly declared himself concerned less ‘with the links that connect Puritanism with the past than with the ways which Puritanism marked out for the future’. By ‘the future’, Haller meant the Puritan Revolution. Collinson is interested ...”

“... was an early version of Hamlet, possibly by Kyd; a prototype Henry V, starring Dick Tarlton and William Knell. And, a little later, there were the first ventures of Ben Jonson – Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Thomas Dekker and Henry Porter, and Robert II, with Henry Chettle – now just bodiless titles in an old theatrical ledger. The case of Marlowe ...”