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“... and autumn of last year. The biographers are Norman Sherry, Anthony Mockler, Leopoldo Duran and Michael Shelden. The actual information they provide must by now be common knowledge among those who are at all interested in Greene, including those who have simply read the many highly communicative reviews, and in the basic respect of the facts imparted there ...”

“... the law of conquest. In his stimulating work on Medieval literacy, From Memory to Written Record, Michael Clanchy has stressed the importance of this conflict in Medieval culture between the clerks’ notions of records and rights which were expressed in parchment (notions congenial to desk-bound historians) and the notions of warriors, men of the sword. In ...”

“... to verbal and physical abuse by police officers who had arrested her in flagrant abuse of their powers and given perjured evidence at her trial. Then the Home Secretary announced the abolition of the right to silence for detained persons held in police stations. Then a man who had been ‘verballed’ by West Midlands Police was awarded £70,000 in ...”

“... of a Victorian sexual culture evaporates, and a sense that something distinctive has escaped their powers of description. To take one example: Victorian men seem to have been unusually subject to fears of impotence. At this period books on the topic become for the first time a fairly regular element in the literature of sexual medicine. It is in this light ...”

“... by the cold mother. They went to Bath, where Thomas started to reveal genuine linguistic powers while at the local grammar school. At this very moment, Mrs de Quincey withdrew Thomas from the school. The reasons for this are obscure, although Leslie Stephen, in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, stresses that she felt Thomas had ...”

“... a third time. Trump was going to win Florida, despite the millions of dollars spent there by Michael Bloomberg, and he was storming ahead of his 2016 numbers in Ohio. The other swing states were closer, but they seemed to be moving his way. On CNN I registered the same dramatic shift in mood. A couple of talking heads looked to be on the verge of ...”

“... States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers.’ The temporary addresses are a fine revision of Cervantes’s pretending not to remember the name of the place where Quixote lived – literally, he says he doesn’t want to remember. But in spite of this and many other echoes, Quichotte is not all ...”

“... meets up with Elektra, and the two spend a good portion of the play invoking the help of the powers of darkness in the killing they have to do. ‘Two murderous children,’ Carson says, ‘are (arguably) redeemed by mutual love’; and certainly their need of so much prayer makes them anything but unreflective killers. ‘You lords of the ...”

“... begging. In 1876, Francis Galton published ‘The History of Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture’. Fascinated by ‘mental heredity’ but unable reliably to distinguish the attributes his subjects were born with from ‘those that were imposed by the circumstances of their after-lives’, Galton hit on a novel idea: assemble a ...”

“... Zach Sodenstern’s Gunther O’Connell saga, ‘a mutant, stray German Shepherd with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies’. ‘He tried desperately to make friends,’ we hear of a literary editor, ‘but enemies were all he ever had.’ The Duchess of Bahamontes was ‘a fine gardener in her old age’. The last work of an Argentinian football fan ...”

“... hieroglyphic script. The king tells the god to take it away, because it would ruin his subjects’ powers of memory and concentration, and fill them with the delusion that they knew things when they did not. The Pharaoh may have had a point, but Plato was not above being perverse, especially when it came to popular culture. It is also clear that he intended ...”

“... of essays, some of which first appeared in this paper, and are now reprinted in Engagement, on Michael Mann, Norberto Bobbio, Roberto Unger, W.G. Runciman. Andreas Hillgruber, Max Weber, Ernest Gellner, Carlo Ginzburg, Isaiah Berlin, Fernand Braudel and Francis Fukuyama. More recently (LRB, 24 September and 22 October), he has extended himself to ...”

“... In Ireland we don’t need aliens; we already have a race of higher beings with strange powers who gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will. We call them priests. A loopy Protestant, on the other hand, has to make it up as she goes along. And no one makes it up better than your American Protestant, driven mad by all that sky ...”

“... their Ottoman overlords that broke out in 1916, and which was a significant help to the Entente powers in their war against the Turks’ ally, Germany. But helping the Allies hadn’t been his main aim. What he had wanted was for the Arabs to take the opportunity of the war to seize power for themselves, in a great pan-Arab federation if possible. He ...”

“... in the work of major artists in their last years, to ask whether they give evidence of failing powers, such as might in the ordinary course of things be expected: senescence; illness; the decay of the senses; the certainty that death, always feared at a distance but now in the room, is taking a hand. Will these afflictions be reflected in a style markedly ...”