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“... from the sense it gives of having been thrown together with a pitchfork (in the phrase of Leslie Stephen), Biographia Literaria conceals idiosyncrasies not so easy to recognise. Coleridge writes in part to answer imputations about his marriage, but silently and completely omits from his life story any mention of it (or of the three children resulting from ...”

“... was, she says,born into the ocean of story, or on its shores. I was the first child of a lively young scientist who loved his country and his zoology. My mother died – he mothered me. I went to bed early and with the light falling from the street lamp through the open slats of the venetian blind he, with one foot on the rather strange bed I had, told his ...”

“... the second of the remarkable triumvirate who inhabit the Museum (the third, in the basement, is Stephen Jay Gould). Lewontin claims that when the conflict between them was at its most intense, Wilson wouldn’t even get into the lift between the museum floors if he (Lewontin) was already inside (an idiosyncrasy parodied by Lewontin in one of his most ...”

“... character’. James’s view was not untypical of the masculine response of the time. Leslie Stephen, a friend and near-contemporary of Mrs Gaskell, regarded her achievements in much the same light as he would have done those of his own daughter; and Jenny Uglow is surely right to stress the implicit comeback in the Gaskell novels, which show them both ...”

“... uses the word to say what he doesn’t understand about the mild manners of children who die young.                     Murderers are easy to understand. But this: that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is ...”

“... almost revivalist in their fervour and the spell they cast over the congregation. So when as a young man I first had thoughts about what nowadays is called stand-up it’s not surprising it took the form of a sermon. Like all parodies it was born out of affection and familiarity and the Anglican services that were in my bones, and there is symmetry here as ...”

“... the book juxtaposes early drawings with later paintings of many of these people: first they’re young, and then suddenly they’re older. David Coster (2005). What is also interesting is that the book includes as well various very beautiful abstract or, rather, non-representational paintings done – in colour – by Bachardy. (These are, in ...”

“... of Forman’s writings and doings. She provides a thumbnail sketch of his life, in the spirit of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, more text than fact, but is convinced that he failed to achieve the goal of his self-construction, ‘a place in the power structure’. She is fine on his medical self-education, visible through his continuing ...”

“... impossible to have any sympathy for a woman who has taken part in the torture and murder of young children makes her case a valuable instrument with which to gauge the objectivity of criminal justice in this country, while the Law Lords’ judgment provides an excellent example of the British judiciary’s habit of presenting their deliberations as if ...”

“... directors were delivering bitter television dispatches about Thatcherism and its repercussions. Stephen Frears’s Bloody Kids, Mike Leigh’s Meantime and Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain revealed more about the Tory menace than anything Loach has come up with to date. These films make a statement that resonates. The images of delegates attending the 1982 ...”

“... unpopular decisions about rearmament. More sympathetically, though with some equivocation, G. M. Young in his official ‘life’ suggested that, whatever the faults of Baldwin’s substantive policies, he at least deserved credit for having forged a united political nation, able to meet the crisis of 1940. Few have been prepared to see much virtue in ...”

“... jurists bring to their cases. Sands portrays the Australian Percy Spender and the American Stephen Schwebel, two judges who served as president of the ICJ in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, as legally enrobed imperial apologists – though he doesn’t quite call them that. During a case brought by Liberia and Ethiopia against apartheid South Africa ...”

“... of poverty’ – he’s not talking about poverty as a social evil here, but giving advice to a young man who wants his father to give him a larger allowance. This is the kind of problem that Epictetus’ version of Stoicism is designed to address: a privileged man is disturbed by the idea that he does not have complete control over every element of his ...”

“... was shown on TV. The film, written by the Anglo-Pakistani Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, told the story of Anglo-Pakistani Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) who, tired of being patronised and bullied by his family, decides to get ahead by opening a gleaming new laundrette in South London. Having acquired the necessary start-up cash by ...”

“... the liberation of Rome in early 1945 Togliatti came into the headquarters of the PCI to find a young militant preparing copy for L’Unita, the party’s daily newspaper. He was wearing battledress left over from his time with the partisans in the North. ‘Are you very poor, comrade?’ Togliatti asked the startled ...”