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“... don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’ According to Richard Clarke, that was George W. Bush’s response when he was told that international law did not permit the retributive use of military force after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.* In fact, there was no legal impediment to the intervention in ...”

“... Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was ...”

“... on Gibran’s drinking and womanising, but then his weaknesses were made public long ago. The broad facts are deducible from Mikhail Naimy’s 1934 biography, if one can stomach Naimy’s twopence-coloured, melodramatic prose. (It was to Naimy that Gibran allegedly turned and said: ‘I am a false alarm.’)As a thinker, Gibran is easy to liken to ...”

“... what isn’t. As well as ‘locking on’, new offences include ‘tunnelling’ and the extremely broad category of ‘interference in key national infrastructure’, which in practice has meant arresting people disrupting ‘transport road infrastructure’. It has become easier to stop and search even where there are no specific grounds for suspicion. The ...”

“... of the struggles of a Christian without God to find a cause; while the gentle and well-meaning Sir Richard Rees, who had known Orwell very well, did write a book about Orwell as ‘almost a saint’. If one must say that biographies are about character rather than about the lives people led, then at least it is prudent to adopt, as philosophers would say, a ...”

“... the University of Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech ...”

“... and then done double Were poor and single business, to contend Against those honours deep and broad, wherewith Your Majesty loads our house. Leavis comments on the possible conflict between the figures implied by ‘deep and broad’ and ‘loads’, remarking that Shakespeare ‘has controlled his realisation to the ...”

“... to broaden the prerogatives he had inherited from his grandfather George II – which were quite broad enough already. In the end, he always bowed to the will of his ministers and the will of Parliament. Because Parliament did, however imperfectly, represent public opinion, this meant that he was ultimately bowing to the will of the country. He gave ...”

“... sleep, reality is superseded by the imperious further reality of first one dream, then another. A broad high-road is covered with liquid mud through which people trudge with wallets on their backs. After a brief moment of wakefulness, Varka dreams the death of her father, rolling on the floor because ‘his guts had burst’ – and the way she felt for ...”

“... Mighty prophets like Gerrard Winstanley (a bankrupt cloth merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ...”

“... of Firbankian tristesse’), but the entire Constant section relies far too heavily on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his debt in the Acknowledgements, but virtually nothing we are told hasn’t stemmed from Shead; the narrative sequence is ...”

“... details are not entirely accurate – Hans Driesch’s name is consistently misspelled and Richard Dawkins is awarded a Nobel Prize (in what field?) – but Kolata is particularly good at providing accessible explanations of scientific ideas and achievements, and even those who know very little about contemporary biology should be able to follow ...”

“... American citizen and, by 1897, professor of mathematics at the new University of South Dakota. Richard Pipes’s The Degaev Affair is the first book-length treatment of the extraordinary lives of Sergei Degaev: his double role as revolutionary and agent provocateur up to 1883, and his subsequent life in America, a life so utterly distinct from what ...”

“... could be dismissed as not especially consequential. In Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (1997), Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen devote only half a sentence to it: ‘The dust cloud … lasted less than two years, and its effects upon the environment, though harmful to people, were short-lived.’ But Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his ...”

“... last great cause’ is echoed in the reminiscences of the international volunteers quoted in Richard Baxell’s exhaustive study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that ...”