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“... proliferated voluntary societies which were devoted to philanthropic endeavour. According to Frank Prochaska, it was in these changed and challenging circumstances that British monarchs first turned their attention to the sort of deliberate, large-scale charitable activity that their forebears had disdained, but with which we are now all so ...”

“... he is a priest defending an altar.’ This was the verdict of G.K. Chesterton on the death of Charles Bradlaugh (1833-91), atheist and republican, publicist for contraception – and, in short, for pretty much everything Chesterton hated. This genial tribute from the champion of Orthodoxy with a capital O to the self-styled ‘Iconoclast’ (Bradlaugh’s ...”

“... Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for glamorous stardom. But no American president before Nixon had ever made a public pronouncement based on his experience of a movie, and, Ronald ...”

“... I’ll take the one that’s a bit of a failure.’ On every floor of the gallery’s new Frank Gehry building there are paintings you could spend half a day in front of, like Monet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1866 (three years after the Manet of the same name), which sets the fall and sweep and swoop of human forms and clothing against the fall ...”

“... wooing by ingesting and recasting his doctrines and preferred idioms. Memoirs in Oxford is also frank – too frank for Hill, who complains that the poem is ‘ridden by the hag Sincerity’ – about Prince’s state of Prufrockian wretchedness and indecision during his undergraduate years: So old, so battered, so ...”

“... homily on the ephemeral ... I was drawn to it as far as I was drawn to the noise of punk: to his frank and determined embrace of moments in which the world seems to change, moments that leave nothing behind but dissatisfaction, disappointment, rage, sorrow, isolation and vanity.’ As Marcus knows, this is fundamentally a religious story, and at several ...”

“... even more true of the minor figures, such as Rhodes’s henchman Rutherfoord Harris, his partner Charles Rudd, or even Leander Starr Jameson. Paradoxically, there exists a first-rate scholarly account of Rhodes’s involvement with the annexation of Bechuanaland – yet no similar treatment of his life. Even the most recent biography (by J. Flint, 1976) is ...”

“... and artists – tracing a line from Rimbaud through Futurism to Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, Frank O’Hara, John Cage and beyond – who have advanced what she sees as modernist goals: above all, the up-to-date, sceptical investigation of the materials and ideas from which a work of art gets made. Though much of Perloff’s writing concerns the great ...”

“... Immediately above lived the widow of Richard Wright, author of Native Son. Above above, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known to outsiders as Le Corbusier. At the end of the courtyard, the house – la maison – and this calls for historical extrapolation. At some moment in the latter half of the 17th century, la maison came into the possession of Marie ...”

“... about Von Stauffenberg’s disgusting treachery be given the airing that history requires? As for Charles Colson, surely beyond any disagreement one of the more poisonous of the little vipers clamouring at liberty’s battered bosom during those grisly two years of the second administration, not even Longford can actually deny that he had been a bit ...”

“... withdraw from society, but he pays a price for closeting himself away. Thorpe uses a phrase by Charles Laughton as the epigraph to Still: ‘The most beautiful thing of all is the complete stillness of an audience so intent it hardly breathes.’ Take this a stage too far, however, and your precious audience will disappear, tired of waiting for the ...”

“... New Zealand, all national dots. Not all poets love places. And not many poets love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close ...”

“... the centre of family life an in-built disappointment, an emotional investment in what is missing. Charles and Isobel in Human Croquet collect things belonging to their absent mother – a shoe, a powder compact, a lock of hair – but fail to make a life for themselves in the present. In the short story ‘Temporal Anomaly’, Marianne, who has been dead for ...”

“... of Oz: A Parable on Populism’ (1964), Henry Littlefield, a high-school teacher, interpreted L. Frank Baum’s novel as an extended metaphor for American politics in the 1890s. He argued that Baum, who in 1888 moved to the territory that became South Dakota, sympathised with the plight of the region’s farmers and was influenced by the views of a man he ...”

“... The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might Face the Rising Sun ...”