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Jan 10, 2025 | 
thetimes.com | Samuel Rubinstein
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
engelsbergideas.com | Samuel Rubinstein
Before R.A. Markus became a historian, he was preparing to become a Dominican friar, and he might never have become a historian if it wasn’t for his novice-master. When he arrived at Blackfriars, Oxford, in 1950, it was decreed that he ‘was not to read any philosophy, just to bring home that [he] was no longer a doctoral student’. The writings of St Augustine of Hippo were, however, deemed to be acceptable reading for the young novice. Thus began a consequential intellectual encounter.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Samuel Rubinstein
On April 3, 1876, the critic Albert Wolff published in Le Figaroa scathing attack on an artistic movement on the rise whose ringleaders were “five or six lunatics, one of whom is a woman”. That one woman was Berthe Morisot and so incensed by Wolff’s words was her husband, Eugène Manet, that he challenged Wolff to a duel.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Samuel Rubinstein
On 27 January next year, the world will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. ‘The commemoration will be the last of its kind’, says Michael Bornstein who, having hidden for six months in his mother’s bunk, aged only four, was among the youngest survivors. What lies ahead regarding Holocaust memory – and anti-Semitism – when Michael Bornstein is no longer with us?
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Samuel Rubinstein
On 27 January next year, the world will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. ‘The commemoration will be the last of its kind’, says Michael Bornstein who, having hidden for six months in his mother’s bunk, aged only four, was among the youngest survivors. What lies ahead regarding Holocaust memory – and anti-Semitism – when Michael Bornstein is no longer with us?
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Samuel Rubinstein
India7 hours agoSector 36 Movie Ending Explained: What Happened In Final Scenesthedirect.com - Klein Felt • 7hAfter looking like the killers may get away with it, the Sector 36 movie leaves fans with just a tinge of hope to hold onto in its shocking ending. …India13 hours agoVideo: Muslim-owned shops attacked in India as religious violence flaresAl Jazeera • 13hReligious tension in India between Hindu and Muslim communities erupted into violence in Rajasthan.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Samuel Rubinstein
Few careers are so fraught with danger as that of the public intellectual. If you write something people like, you have to repeat it ad nauseam, but somehow you’re supposed to stay fresh at the same time. You may have a specific base of knowledge — in, say, late-medieval military history — then be expected to opine on pandemics and AI. You’re not just a thinker but a brand. And your brand probably has a short shelf life — because ideas, even Big Ideas, tend to go stale.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
engelsbergideas.com | Samuel Rubinstein
The Truth about Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism, Alan Lester (ed.), Hurst, £25. If the ‘find function’ on my computer can be trusted, the name of Nigel Biggar appears 376 times in Alan Lester’s edited volume, The Truth about Empire. Sixteen historians have assembled to present their ‘Real Histories of British Colonialism’ in 14 chapters, all adhering to the same structure.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
engelsbergideas.com | Samuel Rubinstein
How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500, Ivan G. Marcus, Princeton University Press, £35In 1258, Ranulph Higden tells us in his Polychronicon, a Jew in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, fell into his toilet. As it was a Saturday, the sabbath, he would not permit himself to be extracted. As though to parody Jewish obstinacy, Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, did not allow him to be rescued the following day, out of reverence for his sabbath.
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Apr 11, 2024 | 
fusionaier.org | Samuel Rubinstein
By Samuel RubinsteinIn 1982, the German writer Peter Schneider tried to capture the strangeness of divided Berlin. His book Der Mauerspringer compiles impressions of Cold War life, some written in a sober journalistic tone and others bearing a hint of magical realism. One line from near the beginning has stuck with me ever since I first read it, and not just because I had to memorise it for my A-Level German exam.
