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“... was beset with what proved to be chronic financial crisis and controversy: to such an extent that Herbert Morrison at one stage feared a collapse of confidence in the Labour Government comparable with that of 1931. Such issues were rarely reducible, however, to simple issues of party politics. Disputes over funding divided, not just Labour from ...”

“... programmers. The first chess-playing program was written on slips of paper by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in the late 1940s. At the time, it was easy to think that a computer capable of playing a decent game would require a kind of general reasoning capacity, that it might need to make logical deductions, think strategically and learn abstract ...”

“... a supplement to social science, propounded early in the century by the Chicago pragmatist George Herbert Mead. ‘From the inside,’ wrote Mead, ‘we find the person stating others to himself in terms of a single positive abstract relation. This is overcome through increase of content in the relation.’ Doubtless ‘increase of content in the ...”

“... Democratic moment when the bottom fell out of the US economy, taking with it the presidency of Herbert Hoover. After FDR’s nomination in July 1932, his running-mate John Nance Garner offered some succinct advice on how to conduct the campaign: ‘All you have to do is stay alive till November.’ ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’: the ...”

“... male and female, self and other, the sexual and the political. Writing about Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath , Kathy Acker commented on its nihilism, as she saw it: ‘The sexual is the political realm. There is no engagement.’ Barbara Kruger paid outrageous homage to Acker by rewriting – or, rather, parodying – her work that same ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... not stop her compulsive flirting. They moved to Harrow and Ivy began to hate her stepfather, Sandy Herbert, for being ordinary and to worship the memory of her father, whom she saw as an intellectual hero. She felt ‘an exile’ both with her family and at the schools they sent her to. She was a nonstop reader and determined to be a writer. Her mother ...”

“... America, where his book has been the focus of much attention. In April 1897 his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of 21 Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home. Theodor Herzl, whose pamphlet The Jewish State had been published the year before, had never ...”

“... of Arnold of Rugby; L.T. Hobhouse, social philosopher and member of a Liberal dynasty; and Herbert Sidebotham, sent on a scholarship to Balliol but as Lancashire as his name. Here was Scott himself, presiding over the paper with robust integrity for almost sixty years and even combining it for a time with membership of the House of Commons. There were ...”

“... In 1967, Herbert Marcuse published a little essay entitled ‘The End of Utopia’, which now reads like a document of a long lost civilisation. Arguing against the pejorative use of the word as a synonym for the absurdly unrealisable, he held that ‘there is one valid criterion for possible realisation, namely, when the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of production ...”

“... that lurked behind political rhetoric, or ‘flapdoodle’ as he called it. Cowling’s mentor, Herbert Butterfield, was Namier’s fiercest critic. In George III and the Historians (1957), Butterfield punctured Namierite reductiveness: ‘Human beings are the carriers of ideas as well as the repositories of vested interests.’ Although Cowling believed ...”

“... Kuper zooms in for a closer look, he selects areas already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham ...”

“... Ukraine). He belonged to a family of Polonised Jewish landowners, and as his new biographer David Hayton notes, was uncircumcised. The family had been called Niemirowski, but this surname was dropped as part of the enforced Germanisation of Jewish surnames in the later 18th century. His parents classed themselves as Roman Catholics, though organised ...”

“... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...”

“... came to be the provision of music, which is fascinatingly discussed by Stanford Lehmberg. George Herbert went twice a week to Salisbury Cathedral, ‘and at his return, he would say that his time spent in prayers and cathedral music elevated his soul and was heaven on earth.’ Cathedral choirs sang the difficult music of Tallis, Byrd and Weekes: Lehmberg ...”