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“... towards GPs, who must inevitably take a wider view of the health needs of their community. As Nicholas Timmins puts it in The Five Giants (1996), we now saw hospital ‘consultants sending GPs Christmas cards, not the other way around’. Second, Thatcher’s Health of the Nation plans, with targets set for cutting diseases such as breast cancer and heart ...”

“... tradition that Shakespeare acted the part of Hamlet’s ghostly father (first mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née ...”

“... local currency. ‘My ideas are very English. I’ve thrown in my lot with England. It’s the best country in the world.’ Such loyal self-deprecation is scarcely less suspect. The Crooked Timber of Humanity is more an elegant restatement than a substantial addition to his characteristic themes. Three quarters of the book consists of essays from the same ...”

“... family. Sinclair offers a fetching portrayal of this world, dividing its genius between ‘the two best scalpers of their generation’: Nicholas Lane, a former rock musician who survives on cocaine, and Dryfeld, a figure who found his name in the Whitechapel Library. Without fixed abode or even substantial bodily form, Lane ...”

“... Farnese an extreme example of a muscle man. It was indeed the language of the body which could best be studied in these famous exemplars: the taut athletic posture of the Borghese Warrior, the sensuous relaxation of the Barberini Faun, the ebbing life of the Dying Gladiator exemplified the expressive potentialities of the male nude, which greatly extended ...”

“... himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it, as the general peace of society will permit.’ The publication of such sentiments in February 1793, a few weeks after the execution of Louis XVI, seemed to ...”

“... Even more prevalent were the ‘whistle-blowing’ denunciations (first identified as such in Nicholas Lampert’s Whistle-Blowing in the Soviet Union, 1985), in which ordinary citizens (usually not Communists) denounced their (usually Communist) bosses for abuses of power – embezzling, bullying of subordinates, nepotism or bribe-taking. In its Soviet ...”

“... Sullivan, Gordon and DeVries all acknowledge debts, and which, for this reviewer, remains the best book on the subject. But the clarity can be deceptive. For the fact is that the record preserves not just one voice but many, and our reception is marred by interference. Sullivan starts from the premise that questions shape answers. (Marc Bloch said that a ...”

“... in leather jackets, peddled Raworth. ‘Read Raworth and Harwood,’ they said. ‘They’re the best we have.’ And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers for a generation. So where did it all go wrong? (Not for the poets, for us.) Raworth’s first proper book, The Relation ...”

“... to see that her guests had fun, apart from good food and good beds ... ’ Masters does his best with Gwladys but she remains unreclaimable, existing merely as a detail in the disquieting persona being built up by Knight. Up until the outbreak of the Second World War, Knight was busy acquiring the notable background that gave him a certain éclat in ...”

“... he never finished a full-scale life. (Characteristically, his 1790 edition simply reprints Nicholas Rowe’s traditional 1709 biography, with extensive exasperated footnotes proving most of it wrong.) He bequeathed both these projects to Boswell’s younger son James, who spent nine years sorting Malone’s notes to produce the massive publication now ...”

“... even dangerously mad. Paranoid megalomania and sense of divine mission ... [Oppenheimer] turned to Nicholas Nabokoff [sic]... and said the Congress was being run ‘without love’. After he had repeated this several times, I remarked that I thought the word ‘love’ should be reserved for the relation between the sexes ... George Kennan was there and gave a ...”

“... there was a split in the revolutionary populist movement. The gradualists, who believed that the best model for an equitable future was the traditional village commune, carried out propaganda work among the peasantry. As time went by, many of them turned their attention to urban workers; some became key figures in early Russian Marxism. And then there were ...”

“... married to the all-powerful Lord Treasurer, Burghley; another sister, Anne, was the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near ...”

“... of living an ancient life. We do not know whether Hugh Latimer really said to his friend Nicholas Ridley, when the two were burned at Oxford in October 1555, ‘Be of good comfort, master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Foxe claimed that he did ...”