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“... politics; from the legalisation of abortion and divorce by mutual consent to the translation of Robert Paxton’s Vichy France. He even includes an attack on French filmmakers for portraying French people as narrow-minded and racist, not to mention feminising the image of the ‘white heterosexual male’. And that was only the 1970s, before the arrival of ...”

“... She wanted her family to treat her like a boy, sometimes even signing letters to them ‘your son, Simon’. She found the idea of being an object of desire repulsive, and dressed in an outlandish way. The poet Jean Tortel remembered her as ‘a kind of bird without a body, withdrawn, in a huge black cloak which she never took off and which flapped around her ...”

“... one more film in Spain (Tristana, 1970), two more films in Mexico (The Exterminating Angel, 1962, Simon of the Desert, 1965), and six films in France (Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964, Belle de jour, 1966, The Milky Way, 1969, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972, The Phantom of Liberty, 1974, That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977).Viridiana has a number of ...”

“... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with ...”

“... criticism only started to emerge in full after his death, in the writings of Father Richard Simon and Reimarus. Spinoza saw the Bible as growing out of the special political ‘religious’ circumstances of the ancient Hebrews. In order to understand how they had developed, the texts had to be studied historically, philologically and contextually. The ...”

“... William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other Presidents, because of the wiretap ...”

“... however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and sound effects seem too spontaneous to be experimental, though they ...”

“... on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his debt in the Acknowledgements, but virtually nothing we are told hasn’t stemmed from Shead; the narrative sequence is reduplicated (Motion’s account of Constant’s first marriage, for instance, follows Shead’s ...”

“... in Elizabethan Culture’, which opens with a quotation from the 1597 diary of the astrologer Simon Foreman, purporting to describe a dream about sexually mastering Queen Elizabeth. Montrose juxtaposes this with a contemporary letter from the French Ambassador, de Maisse, describing the ageing Queen’s cleavage. The essay goes on to describe ...”

“... was a great success. Stead was to have from that time on powerful literary support: Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an interest, and it would grow. It was all ...”

“... the season. The effect followed partly from the translation of the Iliad they’d chosen, Robert Fagles’s from 1990. Fagles goes for the choppy, hard stuff, preferring percussive consonants and end-stopped monosyllables. Some of the pastoral and domestic similes were cut, and a few of the interpolated myths were dropped. The effect was to man up an ...”

“... some more at Le Moulin d’Or in Soho before repairing to Edith’s Belgravia flat. The playwright Robert Bolt, whose work was performed by many of the family (Corin made his mark in the film version of A Man for All Seasons), expressed bafflement that Lady Redgrave put up with it: He seemed to want everything – some of it for his reputation, much of it for ...”

“... of some financial economists has been more clearly performative. Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton’s Nobel Prize-winning option pricing equation of 1973 – which I described two years ago as ‘the single most important breakthrough in the modern mathematical theory of finance’* – didn’t originally describe the market prices of ...”

“... of all kinds. One by-product of their operations was scientific discovery. As the historian Simon Mills has shown, the chaplains sent by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the Levant Company’s factories in the Eastern Mediterranean returned with books for Bodley’s Library and a mummy for the Ashmolean. Edward Pococke brought back not only ...”

“... art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two narratives are here in constant tension. One is an up to date, deeply informed, but ...”