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“... them. ‘O My William,’ Mary begins in answer to the poet’s opening letter: ‘it is not in my power to tell thee how I have been affected by this dearest of all letters – it was so unexpected – so new a thing to see the breathing of thy inmost heart upon paper ... ’. It is a new thing for us too to see the inmost breathings of Wordsworth’s heart ...”

“... essence from us, especially at those moments when we thought it was finally surrendering to the power of our inquiring minds. Faint-hearted thinkers might quail at the thought of setting off in the wake of Heidegger and Hegel. Fernández-Armesto, however – the author of a respected book on Columbus – is nothing if not bold. Indeed, he manages to ...”

“... thought in mind, David Cameron says: ‘We need a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power.’ In the massive, sweeping, radical department, an assault on incautious rhetorical expenditure by newspapers on a jihad, as by politicians scenting an election in the offing, might be more to the ...”

“... views, equally outside the RGS version of Britain. Beyond the railways, canals, megasheds, pylons, power stations and distant docks lies the Footballer Belt, a five-SUV garage kind of domain where the poor drive Teslas and the openings of aesthetic laser enhancement hubs are lavishly celebrated in Cheshire Life. Alderley Edge is the centre of the ...”

“... of this sort has always been a feature of Chinese thinking. But during Mao’s early years in power, the notion that China could make progress only by adopting imported ideas was still a relatively new and radical concept. As recently as the late 18th century, China was still displaying utter disdain for the ideas and innovations coming from Europe. When ...”

“... friend. According to his commissioned biography, For Every Tear a Victory, the amulet gave him the power to disappear and enabled him to survive the Second World War. He claimed to be the most decorated Filipino veteran of the war. In the 1980s, scholars dug into the US archives and discovered that the guerrilla unit he led (after being mysteriously freed from ...”

“... which he maintains an extremely close relationship’. Prominent pro-Israel journalists such as Jonathan Chait and Martin Peretz of the New Republic, and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, quickly joined the fray and Freeman was hammered in publications that consistently defend Israel, such as the National Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly ...”

“... practical activity of dealing with the problems of ‘immediate life’. This conception has real power and glory. It appeals strongly to a down-to-earth, demystifying cast of mind: it has been an intellectual catalyst as well as a pair of intellectual blinkers. But the moment one tries to take it from the level of gripping philosophical rhetoric to that of ...”

“... There are no natural harbours. In 1862, the lords of the Admiralty of the world’s greatest naval power came to inspect its defences but sailed away, finding nowhere suitable to disembark. Whenever strong easterlies made it impossible to land at Creux beach, travellers had to anchor at Havre Gosselin instead, which meant mounting a precarious fifty-step ...”

“... of the open road, Between the Woods and the Water is a lively, engaging book. On 1 April 1982, Jonathan Raban set out from Fowey Estuary in a 30-foot ketch, the Gosfield Maid, to sail round the British Isles. ‘I wanted to find out what, on earth or sea, made my peculiar country tick.’ His procedure was to deal with boat and sea for a while, call in at ...”

“... in a run-down rented house four people, a white couple and two blacks, are planning to blow up a power station. The interlocking lives of the saboteurs as they wait, disguised as an unremarkable suburban household – two young married whites and two black servants – are watched by the author so intently that the peripheral business of an ape at large ...”

“... When Jonathan Lethem was born, in 1964, his mother had dropped out of college and was piercing ears with a pin and ice-cube in Greenwich Village, where she ran with a crowd of folksingers including Tuli Kupferberg, Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs. His father, in an early phase of his career as an artist, was painting basketball hoops, vices and stereopticons ...”

“... she was earning £400 to £500 a year from them. She was fascinated by the task of capturing the power and richness of the natural world, and, typically, drawn to its stranger manifestations. In 1858 she reproduced a Louisiana swamp in all its uncontrolled fecundity for the Illustrated London News. Parkes urged her, without success, to create some more ...”

“... found 3592 individuals who joined the Nazi Party, including 962 who did so before the seizure of power in January 1933. These noble Nazis included members of the oldest and most distinguished East Elbian families: the Schwerins supplied 52 party members, the Hardenbergs 27, the Tresckows 30, and the Schulenburgs 41. The very highest-born ...”

“... altered. He claimed he had always suspected Mynster of taking pleasure in ecclesiastical pomp and power while appeasing his soul with a ‘bargain version of Christianity’. The bishop had been content to live the life of ‘an honourable pagan’, freely confessing that he was ‘very far from having attained what is highest’ and imagining that this trite ...”