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“... which people were ever liable to be moved by words themselves without thought to what ‘weight of matter’ they connoted. It became indeed commonplace in the 17th and 18th centuries to speak (as Locke did) of people supposing ‘Words to stand also for the reality of Things’. It is a theme which reaches an intellectual climax in Jeremy Bentham (Theory of ...”

“... The writers whom he valued, and who crop up most often in these letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts of their ...”

“... his ‘arcadian’ period closed with his production of The Seagull. It was designed by Jocelyn Herbert, who had defined their visual idiom; Peggy Ashcroft, a founder council member of the ESC, played Arkadina, George Devine played Dr Dorn, and Vanessa Redgrave – by then Richardson’s wife – played Nina. His account of The Seagull at the Queen’s ...”

“... of colour when heard against a background of gunfire. Fussell is sourly entertaining also on the matter of army and government incompetence: huge military fuck-ups that have been played down or suppressed, boastful predictions (about tank-power and ‘precision’ bombing) that turned out to be grotesquely wrong. Whenever possible, he indicates that the Huns ...”

“... savant to prompt such thoughts: there was, for example, the other giant of evolutionism, Herbert Spencer, piling up the successive volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy, topped off with the filing-cabinet of The Data of Ethics. But Spencer, though a recluse in later years, was a larger figure in himself, a quirky, querulous, assertively self-made ...”

“... essay for the Venice Biennale on the forged metal sculptures of Chadwick, Armitage and Butler, Herbert Read wrote that they displayed the ‘geometry of fear’ and found allusions to snares, teeth and claws. In the wake of the atom bomb and revelations about the concentration camps, Read’s description helped to determine an angst-filled interpretation ...”

“... ends by revering them. Stone might have written a more serious novel, even with this subject-matter, were it not for the hardened simplicities of his realism, which clear away all complication even in the process of announcing complication. In previous novels, in particular in Dog Soldiers and Outerbridge Reach, Stone has often written with vivacious ...”

“... whole of history. It is that minority with which I am concerned. The opinions of the others do not matter a rap to me. There speaks a man who had no formal education beyond secondary school, who survived into the age of the computer when school-children are lucky to learn even a little about any of ‘the great figures in literature’. No modern British ...”

“... issue to have an affinity with Donne: Bishop’s contemplative clarity has the cunning of George Herbert. Bishop’s poems start most often in calm, with unchallengeable announcements of time, position or attitude, then slide into qualifications and inquiries. The difference between statement and reservation may be no more than a syllable, so that error or ...”

“... to do so in such a way that the people he came in contact with enjoyed it too. This was not a matter of sympathy, or having the gift of intimacy, but more a sort of ‘ray’, like Stiva Oblonsky’s in Anna Karenina. Yet obviously Duff Cooper was no more like Stiva than like Stendhal’s hero. His biographer, who does not sound as if he would be much ...”

“... named John Möller, but characteristically kept the fact to himself. Born in Lübeck and named Herbert Frahm, after his mother, the boy was introduced by his grandfather Ludwig Frahm to the elaborate world of working-class culture which the Social Democrats had constructed. It was not enough for him. He broke with the SPD’s stolid complacency in ...”

“... war loomed. In particular, he tended to the view that it was better to stay onside with Japan, no matter what outrages it committed, rather than get pushed into a pro-American corner. Self tries, rather desperately, to see merit in Chamberlain’s Iron Chancellorship, repeatedly appealing to unspecified ‘modern econometric analysis’ to suggest that he ...”

“... of suburban life is an old one. In a famous study of a 1950s Pennsylvania suburb, the sociologist Herbert Gans found that the urban elite looked on ‘the lower middle and working class with whom I lived in Levittown as an uneducated, gullible, petty “mass” which rejects the culture that would make it fully human, the “good government” that would ...”

“... picture of a life and a time. The position of the author in an autobiography is an interesting matter, to which Strong has clearly given no thought at all. He is the hero of his own life and all people and events are assessed in terms of their importance to him. From his birth weight (just over eight pounds) to his hair, which is still ‘abundant’ at ...”

“... the world at large will obey this call to give up looking for the life in the work is another matter. Some, of course, are already persuaded. Colin Burrow scrupulously resisted biographical readings in his 2002 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, and, reviewing Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) in the ...”