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“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”

“... Gilbert, who had drowned on a voyage to the New World the year before. Ralegh’s propagandist Richard Hakluyt declared that American colonies would provide ‘manifolde ymployment of numbers of idle men’. Money was raised for a fleet of seven ships, which set sail from Plymouth in April 1585 under ...”

“... on they’ll be hard to stop. The Tate’s is the kind of show that sets one generalising. Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, wrote that it had managed ‘to take a non-subject (Picasso’s impact here was limited to a handful of artists) and turn it into a gripping indictment of British culture in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... agitated emotion and toning down many of its adventures, his translation is readable in a way that Richard Burton’s lurid and archaisising version, made fifty years later, is not. Lane expurgated, Burton fantasticated. There have been many wilful translations in the book’s history, a history that in its geographical, linguistic and picaresque range echoes ...”

“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... son, Arthur. Miss Highsmith’s understanding of masculine thought and feeling (in such details as stone-throwing and shirt-buying) is as dazzling as ever. Her whodunnit talent for surprising twists still exhilarates: but this is a ‘straight’ novel, not a puzzle, and the reviewer need not be too shy of revealing the plot. The martyr, ...”

“... tall and rangy, a ‘hollow-cheekt scrag’, but by middle age he had swelled to a corpulent 19 stone. In his poem ‘My Picture Left in Scotland’ (1619) he mocks his unwieldy frame – So much waist as she cannot embrace My mountaine belly and my rockye face – yet seems also to celebrate its craggy solidity. This sense of solidity and stature is also ...”

“... of blacks from political life. It also leads through the reconvening of the Ku-Klux-Klan at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta after the 1915 première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of ...”

“... the hair with a hooked knife called a lunellum, and cut it into rectangular sheets. Scribes kept a stone pumice to even out the gooseberried skin, and perhaps a boar’s tooth to polish the surface so that the ink – made from oak gall – would adhere. They kept another knife to scrape off any mistakes. Such arduous processes were nonetheless used to ...”

“... Theophrastus (Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum) wrote that ‘coral is similar to a stone, is shaped like a root, and found in the sea.’ They were classified as lithophytes (stony plants) by Linnaeus in the early 18th century. Then, in 1752, the French ‘physician-botanist’ Jean-André Peyssonnel sent a treatise to the Royal Society from ...”

“... veterinarians and iron skillets. Over a hundred years ago, the North Country was the last stepping stone to the fulfilment of America’s manifest destiny. Vietnam turned the Great American Dream of the 19th century into the Great American Scheme, leaving Montana and Idaho to be possibly the most provocative critical presences in the American conscience, a ...”

“... alien, but Gumilev is at home with them: his stars hang low. In translation, and particularly in Richard McKane’s (the second book-length selection to be published in English), Gumilev’s language can sound sadly clumsy as well as strange. Gumilev would never have allowed his unicorns to ‘prance’: the Russian is neutral, carrying no other sense than ...”

“... luxury [that] played to every Western European stereotype … about the decadent Orient’, as Richard Miles puts it in his impressive new history of Carthage. Pointing out that Rome’s triumph over Carthage ‘provided an attractive blueprint’ and ‘metaphor’ to justify French domination in North Africa, Miles dismisses Salammbô as ‘the most ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... Biographia Literaria, which he subtitled Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Richard Holmes, by reputation anyway, is different; and certainly his magnificent life of Shelley makes time, in the course of unravelling the threads of Shelley’s emotional, intellectual and imaginative life, to introduce its readers to writings that most of ...”