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“... a torrential thunderstorm and forgetting to wipe my feet I trailed wet footsteps all across her white carpet, thus putting paid to any hope of research into the friars, barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of ...”

“... simply (or simplistically), black writers probably want to talk about the same sorts of things as white writers – love, loss, desire, power, their relationships with their personal, social and political communities, with their environment, with other texts. Each writer, whether white or black, will draw on a varying ...”

“... The Mask of Apollo and The Praise Singer, would focus on performers), and the lectures given by Gilbert Murray, the Regius Professor of Greek, which reignited her passion for the ancient world. As other Oxford students became caught up in the General Strike and embraced Moral Rearmament, Mary decided she was a fifth-century BCE Platonist. It was not the ...”

“... not only ignores the deathbed conversion described and widely promoted by that writing bishop, Gilbert Burnet, but also all the opprobrium flung at Rochester’s head. Much more than Lord Byron, Rochester was considered mad, bad and dangerous to know. His own relatives were disgusted with him, and showed it in perpetuity by leaving his burial place without ...”

“... began to look like sulking. Prince Humbert of Italy was not amused to find himself staying at the White Hart Inn in Windsor having been told there was no room at the castle. A cartoon of Buckingham Palace with a ‘To Let’ sign, rumours that Victoria had gone mad or was about to abdicate, the Saturday Review’s pointed remarks about ‘seclusion’ being ...”

“... Bervin surmises in her introduction, that Dickinson may well have kept in the pocket of her famous white dress. Dickinson’s ‘one surviving dress has a large external pocket on the right side, where her hand would fall easily at rest’. The ‘economy’, Bervin continues, ‘of the pocket is worth considering. An envelope is a pocket. An envelope refolds ...”

“... new historians, among them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the ...”

“... in the summer of 1814, in which Cochrane and Cockburn sailed up the Potomac, dined in the White House on the banquet that the fleeing President Madison had left behind, then burned the city’s public buildings. Fifty years later, while protesting neutrality, Britain effectively sided with the South in the Civil War. Is it any wonder that in 1914 the ...”

“... Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s eyes are ‘heavily underpencilled in blue, like the woad dye of an ...”

“... Scottish as Alastair) describes watching the 1966 World Cup Final on a flickering black and white TV in a pub in a West Highland village. He was one of perhaps a dozen out of forty or fifty blokes who didn’t cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of ...”

“... I’d eat you!                     In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, Juicy little, right little, missionary stew. What for Sweeney is a façon de parler turns in some modern novels – Genet’s Pompes Funèbres, Monique Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien – into full-scale devourings of the ...”

“... pardonable,’ he said of that time. Snobbery was an even less sympathetic part of the story. When Gilbert Murray got him to write The Problems of Philosophy for the Home University Library, Russell referred to the assignment contemptuously, described it as a ‘shilling shocker’, said it was ‘philosophy for the Midwest’ and intended to enlighten shop ...”

“... his spell as a Marine. When his superior officer, Lord Lovat, who had seen him drunk in the bar at White’s every day of the previous week, received a letter of advice from Waugh about how he should be running the unit, there was a colossal falling out between the two men from which Waugh’s military career never recovered. Stannard is surprised that Waugh ...”

“... origins and politics were no less an issue. ‘The riff-raff takes over,’ the Tory MP Sir Gilbert Longden complained, while to his colleague Gerald Howarth it was a case of ‘another probable Bolshie poet seeking to impose his frustrations on the rest of us’. Just as Harrison’s English teacher wouldn’t allow him to impose his low-life Yorkshire ...”

“... Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler … I remember vaguely a white drawing-room with Whistler etchings, ‘let in’ to white panels, and a dining-room all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the ...”