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“... also the subject of one of the best critical essays of the last quarter-century, an explication by Joseph Brodsky). Auden, however, quickly came to dislike the poem – he had dropped the offending stanza by 1944 – principally on the grounds that it’s untrue to say that we must love one another or die, since even if we do love one another we’re all going ...”

“... Consider an English domestic gardener troubled by a most common affliction: the depredations of the caterpillars of the cabbage-white butterfly (Pieris rapae) as they chomp their way through the leaves of his cabbage plants. Much incensed by this, he has resort to proprietary brands of chemical insecticide available to him courtesy of Messrs Shell, ICI, Fisons et al ...”

“... became an aristocratic status symbol. As late as 1772, the distinguished naturalist Sir Joseph Banks fell out, preposterously, with Captain Cook because Cook would not let him take an entourage which included two french-horn players to the South Seas on board the good ship Resoultion. (Banks and his musicians went to Iceland instead.) Exotic and a ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... high value he attached to the idiomatic word ‘fellow’. There is a passage in Jessie Conrad’s Joseph Conrad as I knew him which, with its progression from tragic entreaty to Anglo-Saxon understatement, nicely epitomises Conrad’s halfway naturalisation. The Conrads were crossing the North Sea, in 1914, en route for Poland. Jessie lay in her bunk feeling ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... and ascribed in part to the influence of Burke, ‘the use of spies and informers’ by John Reeves and the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. A mostly sceptical reader of Burke’s anti-revolutionary writings of the mid-1790s, Gillray cared enough for his Letter to a Noble Lord to pay it the homage of ...”

“... to have cost £80,000: the Whig spent £30,000 and still lost. The burden could be crippling. John Benett, MP for Wiltshire, was told by his brother in 1820: ‘The failure of the subscriptions at both the last elections has already thrown an overwhelming debt upon your property, and one that you will never see cleared as long as you live.’ And all for ...”

“... Brought before Pharaoh’s Daughter’ (1736) ‘Hannah Osborne, Daughter of John Ranby’ (c.1747-50) detail of ‘Captain Thomas Coram’ (1740)PreviousNext In a thoughtful essay Lamb himself attacked the notion that what is most Hogarthian about Hogarth is what is most broadly comic, most boisterous, most fun. This, he claims, is ...”

“... retrieved last year through the enterprise of resident departmental keepers, and grants from Joseph Hotung of Hong Kong, Asahi Shimbun (a Japanese newspaper), and matching funds from the Wolfson Foundation and the British Government. I have condensed this latter-day story from Robert Knox’s 1992 monograph, which for the first time gives a detailed ...”

“... live in the world rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species,’ wrote Joseph Addison. ‘I have entered all the parts of my life as a Looker-On.’ The enlightened spectator’s irony allowed him to respond to any romantic idea of the South Seas with ribald laughter. Tahiti represented a theatre of the grotesque in which native ...”

“... of the proto-Romantic feeling for the sublimity of nature that animates, say, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, partly set in Bage’s own county of Derbyshire). What is significant is the author’s resolute provincialism – few if any early English novelists had a more confident indifference to London. That revolutionary ideas might develop in the new ...”

“... Runyon, Ford Madox Ford, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Walter Winchell and Joseph Alsop, who was required to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune. Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa Maxwell and Jack ...”

“... the lives he didn’t save. When the ‘torn, dead and naked body’ of one of the cabin boys, Joseph Hannah, is discovered in a cask meant for storing minced blubber – the novel enforces the idea that there is a continuity between sanctioned violence against animals (whales, bears, seals, dogs) and unsanctioned violence against other people ...”

“... of public opinion. The Presidential election of 1800, in which Jefferson trounced the incumbent John Adams, witnessed an outpouring of newspaper and pamphlet comment directed against his religious indifferentism. Could he be so sure that an atheist would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse ...”