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“... and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison takes issue with Corelli Barnett’s Audit of War, and its diagnosis of the causes of Britain’s post-war economic decline. Barnett argued, not only that British economic ...”

“... to pederasty among priests’. Two New York Times science journalists – William Broad and Nicholas Wade – were outraged at what they saw as bland indifference to the problem on the part of leaders of the scientific community, and in 1982 they published a book – Betrayers of the Truth – that alleged widespread fraud and judged science’s ...”

“... disliked: they are pigs, flics. Just how bewildered this animosity is making them is revealed in Nicholas Alex’s vivid book, New York Cops Talk Back: A Study of a Beleaguered Minority.1 They used to derive their self-esteem from the belief that they were the guardians of society, the embodiment of its values: they represented right. The police ...”

“... Tales: they are printed the way they are because someone, after Chaucer’s death, had to make the best he could of what he had. Yet though everyone knows this, in a sort of a way, their profession makes critics dig order and unity out of somewhere: ‘Most studies of the Tales,’ Pearsall writes in an uncompromising footnote, ‘use one or other of the ...”

“... Cromwell’s time, reduced Elizabeth Bowen to the vagrant life which in a sense came to suit her best, the life of a prince or princess in exile: and in literary terms one in which ‘the Great God Chance’, as she named him, could be let loose to overwhelm her imagination. As with James, iron discipline was none the less the order of the day; the dismal ...”

“... died in 1641. Given the ‘eclectic’ character of Bedford’s religious preferences, which are best characterised as Calvinist Episcopalian, and the amphibious nature of his associations with both Royalists and Parliamentarians, Russell concluded that his ancestor’s career provided ‘absolutely no clue to what side he would have taken if he had lived to ...”

“... the conversations he is describing more is going on than is quite being said. The moment that best illustrates this (and it would be my poetical desert island disc for its great social delicacy) is when Dante and Virgil meet the poet Statius in purgatory. Statius explains who he is and tells Dante that Virgil’s Aeneid was mother and nurse to him. Virgil ...”

“... remains limited, and is more pronounced in the United States than in Europe. Two historians, Nicholas Guyatt of the University of York and Luke Clossey of Simon Fraser University, have compiled a fascinating report on this, an extract from which recently appeared in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. After examining the ...”

“... that still ruled Europe in the years before 1914, Wilhelm’s inordinate loquacity stood out. Tsar Nicholas II was retiring by nature and George V was painfully shy. Scarcely a peep was heard in public from the elderly Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, a notoriously austere and laconic figure. And the contrast is heightened in retrospect by the fact that ...”

“... if Wyatt literally saw Anne’s beheading from his cell. It would have been an oblique view at best, fitting for a poet whose verse unswervingly resists directness. Opacity was a necessity for a court poet serving a king who killed over words; ‘familiar secret talk, nothing affirming’ had been enough to condemn Thomas More. As a result Wyatt’s verse ...”

“... Seduction: Being, An Account of the Late Proceedings . . . against the Reverend Abbée, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for Committing Rapes upon 133 Virgins (1725), he voices anxiety ‘lest this Factum for Abbée des Rues, and the Revival of Marvell’s Works, should heap more Coals of Fire upon my Head’, and then adds defiantly that ‘as to the Principles ...”

“... need for funds seems to have driven Kibaki to make his alliance with Moi and his wealthy henchman Nicholas Biwott. Rewards necessarily followed. The big winner in the new cabinet is George Saitoti, who has been made minister for internal security. Although his background is in academia, Saitoti amassed a fortune while serving as a minister under President ...”

“... George Carman QC, the best known British advocate of his time, died of cancer on 2 January last year. Shortly afterwards, the Daily Telegraph published an obituary which listed the famous criminal and libel cases he had won, and examined his ferocious court-room reputation before concluding: ‘Away from work, Carman was a reasonably enthusiastic guest on the party circuit, but essentially lived a quiet life ...”

“... After the Fascists took over (the country and the paper), he went back to Trieste, getting by as best he could, eventually leaving for Paris in 1935 when, ‘with Mussolini’s ghastly war in Ethiopia, he could bear it no longer.’ Along with eight or nine other Italian émigrés, Weisz is on the editorial board of Liberazione, a samizdat liberal monthly ...”

“... aesthetics, particularly as epitomised by the novels of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul). Nicholas Marston, writing on Schumann’s heroes Schubert, Beethoven and Bach, quotes the 19-year-old composer telling Wieck: ‘when I play Schubert, it’s as if I were reading a novel “composed” by Jean Paul.’ And in his chapter on Schumann’s ‘Novel ...”