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“... is so alluring and so suspect; the astounding unreality of it all immerses you. If you sat through Stephen Daldry’s The Reader recently, you might have found it tough to resist the thought: ‘Those poor Nazi guards, they really suffered.’ Watching GWTW, you are similarly corralled into feeling: ‘Those poor plantation owners, they really had it ...”

“... and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a sharp contrast to the smaller-than-life mediocrities who occupy seats ...”

“... and cows are sacred. One case in a million per year is truly rare; it is the prospect of a future sharp increase which has caused alarm. CJD is a disease for which there is no explanation and no known treatment. It is important not to get CJD out of proportion. It is one of a suite of neurodegenerative diseases in which things go wrong with the central ...”

“... by the people who are actually re-inventing the limits of knowledge, articles which are like sharp needles penetrating the void of ignorance. To be inspired to think for oneself, it is important, occasionally, to hear the voices of people who are actively engaged in thinking original thoughts. I do not think it matters that one may not understand ...”

“... politics. Prominent among them are a lengthy defence of the traditional view of the Cold War and a sharp attack on the new, more approving picture of Eisenhower.* Schlesinger and others might well take comfort from the appearance of four new books concerned with the Cold War, the Eisenhower presidency, or both. All are aimed at general, rather than scholarly ...”

“... Even now, the cover of A Brief History of Time sets a tiny, and almost literally disembodied, Stephen Hawking against a vast backdrop of the starry heavens. But already by the Sixties and Seventies a new presentation of scientific self began to circulate. James Watson radically confessed that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working hard ...”

“... in the Observer, he describes how, with 3188 pages of text set and proof-read, he began to feel sharp chest and stomach pains. ‘My wife was certain that I was spending too many hours crouched over my desk.’ A few weeks later, Davison had to have a sextuple heart by-pass, after which he felt that he was ‘living on borrowed time’. It all sounds rather ...”

“... as the recognised majority voice of the alternative. Its meagre military impact stands in sharp contrast to its wide symbolic appeal. Where Sampson wants to make the ‘revolution as bloodless and manageable as possible’, John Saul is primarily concerned with its socialist outcome.* His account deals with familiar instances of repression and ...”

“... was taken by nationality (natsional’nost’ – rendered by Baiburin’s translator, Stephen Dalziel, as ‘ethnic origin’, which doesn’t do justice to the essentialist overtones of the Russian word).‘Soviet’ itself wasn’t a nationality: rather, it was the citizenship shared by all denizens of the multinational USSR, each of whom, in ...”

“... of the Golis Mountains, Fiqi Ayuub might under other circumstances have seemed idyllic. The hills, sharp and jagged, stretched off into the distance beneath a mercilessly bright sky. One of Save the Children’s emergency health teams had already set up shop under the eaves of a long, red-roofed building, and a couple of hundred women and children were waiting ...”

“... I mention these examples from Kraus’s own linguistic and historical world – Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, in their book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, suggest that Kraus’s work is the other, ‘unwritten’ half of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – in order to suggest both that there may be times and places where aphorisms flourish especially and that there ...”

“... social, but not always friendly process: an inky collision of scholarship, manual labour and sharp business practices, operating under financial pressures and a hail of deadlines. The looming Frankfurt Book Fair caused such stress in Thomas Platter’s printing house in 1536 that Platter’s partner Balthasar Ruch attacked him with a ‘heavy pine ...”

“... end as a leaden drip.”’ This is not quite an empty threat. In this book people can snap into sharp focus at one moment, like Jane, and then simply melt away. So when Anne Boleyn is imprisoned and learns that her alleged lover Henry Norris has refused to clear her name, ‘she seems to dissolve and slip from their grasp, from Kingston’s hands and ...”

“... cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint Irene’, the ...”

“... say, Groundhog Day) than because the situation has been resolved on its own terms. Despite​ Stephen Dedalus’s assertion in Ulysses that ‘amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life,’ motherhood isn’t a particularly common central subject for treatment in fiction. Nevertheless Phillips is working within a ...”