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“... they claim, was a newly hatched rationalism running around with the shell on its head. As Charles Taylor wrote in A Secular Age, the Reformation was ‘central to … the abolition of the enchanted cosmos and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith’. This is the influential master narrative to whose attempted demolition Alexandra Walsham ...”

“... was quite transfixing. When you were listening to Bryan Ferry, according to the style panjandrum Peter York, ‘you were listening to a singer whose whole approach said: “I’m not singing, I’m being a singer.”’ There’s a crucial difference. Everyday British life in the 1980s took a turn towards the performative; style became a matter of exhibiting ...”

“... Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged prams, free-range, snot-rich urchins and, as the architect Peter Barber recalled with nostalgie de la boue, ‘an elderly woman who used to stand at her gate all day long and everybody knew what was going on on the street because she was a kind of conduit’.It isn’t surprising that it took time to catch on. It ...”

“... Common and that night I discovered Shamdasani by chance in the lobby bar sitting with Eugene Taylor, another historical researcher with a deep interest in psychology at the turn of the century. The Countway Library has several different collections pertaining to Jung, and it was a time before we got through all the papers in Shamdasani’s satchel. We ...”

“... The frontispiece of Olive Schreiner’s novella about the Matabeleland campaign, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), carried a photograph of three Black men hanging from a tree, with white men in hats arrayed in a semicircle around the bodies. The dead men are naked. Some of the living men are dressed in what look like cricket whites. One has ...”

“... humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary conceptions in human history, which Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self claims as Christian in inspiration. The modern equivalent of Moll Flanders in this respect is EastEnders. Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where ...”

“... The Brutalist wing of the IG was represented by the team of Paolozzi, Henderson and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who littered a bare shed on a rough patio with symbolic relics (it looked as though it had been ‘excavated after the atomic holocaust’, the critic Reyner Banham remarked). On the proto-Pop side of the IG were Hamilton, John McHale ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”

“... imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya ...”

“... book is high. Hellman is not the only snotty famous person to fall under her jaded eye. James Taylor and Carly Simon, Hellman’s guests one sunny afternoon, ‘smile stiffly’ at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”

“... of the war, Joyce had ‘broadcast for the enemy’, and that was enough to finish him. A.J.P. Taylor later remarked that he was hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a small fine. Widespread wireless ownership led to a wartime golden age of radio propaganda. The Nazis were quickest off the mark, but other ...”

“... its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new evidence of sexual hedonism in practice, especially in the record of one joyously sensual upper-middle-class threesome living in the Connecticut Valley at the height of Victorian ...”

“... be definitive ... Our own edition ... is inevitably not only fallible but arbitrary.’ Gary Taylor’s General Introduction carefully explains why this is so. It does a great deal more than that, tracing with learning and amenity the history of editorial interferences from the moment when Shakespeare’s ‘plot’ and his ‘foul papers’ were ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”