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“... on which Inglis’s gods and heroes disport themselves. Thus at the memorial meeting in Conway Hall there is Nick Garnham, ‘elegant, intelligent, disdainful Wykehamist’. Earlier, at the Garden House Hotel riot – a Cambridge protest against the rule of the Greek colonels – there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not ...”

“... somewhat belatedly, they did Leslie Stephen. (He eventually resigned his fellowship at Trinity Hall, and we now learn that he may have been brought near to suicide.) Not that life was always so thrilling; Stephen, in fact, found Cambridge dull. ‘The only persons I thoroughly liked were Jebb the public orator and Mrs Jebb,’ he wrote later: ‘but Mrs ...”

“... fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the ...”

“... rationality naturally casts infancy as a state in which something is lacking – as when John Stuart Mill in On Liberty writes in exasperation of the ‘mere children’ to which a stupid society reduces its adult population. But, on the other hand, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the other great Romantics, to whom Victorian intellectuals such as Mill were ...”

“... Revolution of twenty years before had united England, but divided Scotland and Ireland. The exiled Stuart monarchy was still influential, and its supporters knew very well that one essential purpose of Union was to keep it in exile. Anon-state institution, the Presbyterian Kirk, enjoyed something of the prestige normally given to parliaments. But, although ...”

“... English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its original with many laughs. In_Doctor Criminale, the issue is more pointed. The narrative contains a series of prominent and very ...”

“... first. On 4 February 1658, seven months before his death, he arrived unannounced at Westminster Hall in a hackney carriage – the Thames was icebound – and told his startled son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, that he intended to dissolve Parliament. Think hard about it first, Fleetwood pleaded, for it is a decision of great consequence. ‘You are a ...”

“... great houses. Protestants across Europe also detested and feared Jesuit success. Tudor and early Stuart England led the way in inflicting barbarous deaths on Jesuit missionaries; the archetypal martyr was the spirited and multitalented former Oxford don Edmund Campion. Before he converted from Protestantism, he had mightily impressed Queen Elizabeth with his ...”

“... architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder and ...”

“... for epilepsy was particularly insisted on; and Shakespeare’s own son-in-law, the physician John Hall, records its use in a ‘fume’ to be inhaled at the onset of a fit. No wonder, then, that in Othello Desdemona seeks to bind her epileptic husband’s head with a handkerchief that, we later learn, was ‘dyed in mummy’ by the Egyptian sorceress who ...”

“... most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall. I ate and drank with Russell for five years, often wondering what he was for and how on earth he had got to where he had from our common starting point in a Dublin suburb. Russell’s reputation was made by his brilliant defence of the Irish Nationalist MP ...”

“... In his memoirs, quoted here, Byrne wrote: ‘I simply climbed over the railing to the right of the hall door, dropped down to the front area, and went in to the basement of the house by the unlocked side door.’The resident of 7 Eccles Street in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, and he performs the same manoeuvre: ‘Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed ...”

“... a soft boy in a hard world?’ It’s a question asked by the hero’s older brother in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and it is just as much the preoccupation of his follow-up, Young Mungo, as shown by the new novel’s dedication: ‘For Alexander and all the gentle sons of Glasgow’. The worlds of the books are ...”

“... Arendt cult is a riddle,’ Walter Laqueur sighed in the 1990s, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire had sighed before him. So much reverent attention for someone so ‘devoid of originality, depth and a systematic character’. Was it because women like reading other women, Laqueur wondered, and was this the reason Arendt herself, ‘a highly ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”