“... family that one can’t help feeling it would have been proper, as with Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, to publish the work (at least initially) under a pseudonym. The review copy of Theodore Zeldin’s first novel is accompanied by a separately-printed 2,000-word statement by the author, entitled ‘How I came to write Happiness’. This preface is ...”

“... Scott’, and so to the tradition of cultural comparativism so strong in the American novel to Henry James and beyond. It is the comparative, multicultural nature of Don Juan that gives point to the un-English Byron’s statement in the poem:   I am half a Scot by birth, and bred A whole one. Sartor Resartus, whose Ecclefechan author began by writing ...”

“... anxious to place themselves in a context, try hard to evoke it. Sylvia Lawson, a descendant of Henry Lawson, was a pioneer –the pioneer – Australian woman literary journalist in the Fifties. In the editorial office of Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation magazine in George Street, Sydney, she would elegantly sip the wine provided while the rest of us tried to ...”

“... or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his hand to get it.’ This selfishness was not a reversion to ...”

“... was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where ...”

“... playmates and arrange a proper reunion. Having put Rabbit Angstrom to rest and closed the book on Henry Bech, Updike understands the formalities of reintroducing characters who have been kept in storage. It’s been more than two decades since the original novel and the mental picture of its warlock and witches was colonised by the movie version, remembered ...”

“... And yet, Malcolm believes, Plath ‘did not write – and could not have written – The Bell Jar or Ariel in her native Massachusetts’. She needed to shed her American accent, appearance, identity, to become an artist; ‘like so many women writers, she had to leave the daylight world and go underground to find her voice.’ Not only Plath but the ...”

“... the New Republic, as chairman of the American Veterans’ Committee and as a liberal supporter of Henry Wallace, Michael Straight became for a time a quite vigorous and effective opponent of the Communist Party of the United States in the years before the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy got into their stride. He was lucky to escape their ...”

“... or ways of forming adverbs, as well as by citations and references. (The thing which first rang a bell in Alice Kelly’s mind was Metesky’s use of the plural word ‘injustices’, accompanied by a threat ‘to take justice in my own hands’; both the word and the phrase also occurred in the Mad Bomber letters.) Some of the evidence in these cases is ...”

“... 1936 Buick in 1949, and how the dealers rooked him on each trade-in. In another, he is hired by Ma Bell to lecture her junior executives on The Brothers Karamazov, in the hope of reducing ‘patterns of over-conformity’ among the staff. Schwartz is unable to appear natural or at case in these pieces, and it is hard to believe that each one underwent numerous ...”

“... to have him in the Cabinet all the same. Powell was uneasy (‘it’s like having a debate with Henry VIII – I was conscious that he had the axe down by his chair’), while Macmillan complained that ‘Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable Popes.’ Powell won. Lord Home came to the Cabinet room one day to find ...”

“... not a stroll among the great monuments of a now canonised modern period – a diving bell into Post-Modernity, if you will. This term must be understood as referring to a scene and historical situation, rather than designating a style itself by now relatively antiquated (of the great Post-Modernist names – Charles Moore, for instance – very ...”

“... he could have given us the Court of George IV just as his hero Holbein gave us that of Henry VIII – but he saw history painting as a duty and he rejected the invitation with disdain. The transformation that Ingres worked on flesh does not obliterate personality. M. Bertin, the journalist, hands on knees – almost, but not quite on the point of ...”

“... way. To the end of his days, he had no idea who his father was. Erikson’s name may now ring a bell for very few people, and even they may be surprised to realise that he died only a few years ago. He had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to have begun in the mid-1950s, when his book ...”

“... process gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”