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“... and ‘Effect of music on’. She also has an ear for language and quotes judiciously. Thomas Clark, the proprietor of a menagerie in Exeter Change in London, had an Indian rhinoceros in 1790 which was extraordinarily docile and had a temperament ‘equal to that of a tolerably tractable pig’. It liked to drink sweet wine and would bleat like a ...”

“... Yet contemporaries were convinced that the problem of atheism was both pervasive and growing. As Thomas Nashe put it, ‘there is no Sect now in England so scattered as Atheisme.’ The Spanish ambassador, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, reported in 1617 that some 900,000 people (more than a quarter of England’s estimated population), were ...”

“... its four main characters, but steadily backwards in time. Not in the too-clever-by-half way that Martin Amis rewinds the life of a Nazi doctor in Time’s Arrow, but by setting the book’s three parts in 1947, 1944 and 1941 consecutively. ‘So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you’ve become,’ the first chapter begins. In 1947 we find out ...”

“... him and his supporters as far-right zealots. Social scientists, among them Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, saw the Goldwaterites as the embodiment of a pathological ‘authoritarian personality’, wholly out of touch with the liberalism they believed was central to the American public. ‘When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so ...”

“... to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum. By this time, Dia had acquired nearly seven hundred works, and to show this collection needed more space than the real-estate market in Manhattan would allow. From a plane above the Hudson River an appropriate ...”

“... for] blond Hans Hansen and blonde Inge Holm’ – the love of the outsider for the insider. Thomas Mann made Tonio dark and shy and half Latin American. Being Thomas Mann, he couldn’t make him Jewish, but as an expression of the story’s theme, he might just as well have done. After the war the adolescent Paul ...”

“... for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for example, he faked an excellent version of Thomas Chatterton’s (already fake) mode. Another poem in his ambit is probably Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl (1985), a dream-allegorical confrontation in which malign powers are named with outlandish blazons such as ‘Zandra’, ‘Saatchi’ and ...”

“... with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and echoes of De Quincey, Shelley, Frankenstein (not sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood (I ...”

“... is the magazine whose identity was moulded during the Thirties, under the editorship of Kingsley Martin and after the merger with the Nation. Yet the New Statesman had almost two decades of existence before that, under an editor whose length of tenure has been exceeded only by Martin’s. A handful of disconnected facts ...”

“... for the ‘authorised’ biographer, and the second constitutes the principal material on which Mr Martin Gilbert is working for his great biography of Churchill. Mr Carlton’s work may therefore be ‘interim’ for other reasons than the Thirty Year Rule. Nevertheless this is undoubtedly an important book, the first major and serious biography of someone ...”

“... and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most naturally, and most amusingly, ironic. And Iris Murdoch has written repeatedly that the definition of the great novel is the free and realised life it gives to its ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... party or continue as a front for the IRA. Ignoring renewed protestations from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that Sinn Fein is separate from the IRA, that it is a political party with a democratic mandate from its voters, most politicians and observers have, like Major himself, accepted almost without question the Unionist formulation: Sinn ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”

“... to police violence against black people, but the protests against the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were mostly confined to the cities in which the deaths had occurred. Obama was seen as sympathetic to BLM’s concerns, even if he offered little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of ...”