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“... making a career around Larkin is that the output is quite small, and others, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite, have already picked the meat out of the life. What’s left after a couple of books of literary criticism wouldn’t amount to a serious life’s work for a mayfly. Or shouldn’t. There is, however, an unmistakable reverential quality in the ...”

“... constant and often irritating parallels drawn from modern Oxbridge. A later master of Balliol, Anthony Kenny, drew more useful parallels in his 1985 study of Wyclif: ‘Contemporary Oxford philosophy resembles the philosophy of Wyclif’s day more than it matches the Oxford of the 19th century or the Paris of the 20th century. Like Wyclif’s ...”

“... followed the coffin of Emily Davison, who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of the King’s horse. Her account of Davison’s career is nobly felt and phrased, but hagiographical to the point where the reader starts niggling, and about points which may not be central to the theme. Twice she rejoices that the executioner was an ‘unmalicious ...”

“... alcoholic) until his death in December 1985. She hardly left the house after this – according to Anthony Thwaite, who edited this collection – and died in February 2001. These letters are very different from those collected in the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-85. Those were spirited, eloquent, witty (anyone who met Larkin would have been struck ...”

“... probably knew, more or less. What may come as a surprise is that he had been appointed equerry to King George as early as 1944, when Margaret was only 14. By then, he had a wife, Rosemary, and a small son. Margaret said, much later, that she really fell in love with him in 1947 when he accompanied the royal family on their tour of South Africa and they rode ...”

“... relentless in pursuit of vendettas, one of the most successful of which was the campaign against Anthony Powell, which offered scope for every element of Waugh’s mixed feelings about literary life. He objected to Powell’s ‘abominable’ prose, to his pretentiousness in insisting that his name be pronounced ‘Pole’ because of his supposed descent ...”

“... plans for a permanent memorial for himself: a thanksgiving for having become the least likely king of England since William in 1066. Henry placed his tomb in Westminster Abbey, served by the most elaborate chantry chapel in English history, but this was only the centrepiece of a series of arrangements involving a consortium of the greatest Benedictine ...”

“... unofficial and convenient way even if at first it is a little forced’. But the role of the Good King soon began to pall. At Oxford, he wrote to a friend: ‘I wish to God I’d been brought up in an intelligent, sane (but not too stiff and British) middle-class family with a close connection with some kind of work ...”

“... Snow-drifts on the fingers burning. Ice, hurricane, cry: No returning. Does my husband the King know, does he guess In this wintriness Is my happiness? Much has been made of her weary longings for death, yet in Novel on Yellow Paper Pompey suspects that ‘we shall spend eternity wishing we could set eyes on Aunt Martha’s old fur cape.’ ‘I love ...”

“... wreaking havoc on reaching actual size, but he was less impressive and more sinister than that, a King Charles spaniel of vicious temperament, a cute Walt Disney rattlesnake, or a beautiful child vampire. He was hardly an angel in the 1890s, but he truly blossomed after Oscar’s death, when he converted to heterosexuality and the Catholic Church. Wilde ...”

“... roughly to the duration of his relationships with three different women: his first wife, Mary King, whom Day Lewis married in 1928 (politics); his lover, Rosamond Lehmann, with whom he began an affair in 1941 (eros); and his second wife, Jill Balcon, who he married in 1951, six days after divorcing Mary (thanatos). It is undoubtedly a beautiful theory; so ...”

“... girlhood’; in 1937 they were absorbed, both in London and Ottawa, in the preparations for King George VI’s coronation. Elizabeth – ‘all pink and white and golden’, as Ritchie remembered her – was much more enthusiastic than her sister Jane, an unimpressed aggressive girl who resented the flummery and chiefly remembered not having been able ...”

“... philosophy of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the grandson of Locke’s patron, the Whig grandee Anthony Ashley Cooper, and the contemporary of Addison and Steele. Klein’s subject is the political dimension of Shaftesbury’s promotion of ‘politeness’, a virtue he sought to identify with the causes of civil and religious liberty. Like many Whig or ...”

“... start by treating the Royals as ghosts. Yes, we did once love them truly, madly, deeply; but Anthony Minghella’s Zeitgeist movie didn’t just argue that after-images may – perhaps even should – come back to haunt us. The point, surely, was that their sole utility should then be as midwives of a new start, a time that will allow them to cease ...”

“... God had declared himself: he and his ceremonies would not be mocked. (And, incidentally, the King and the bishops were right and their Parliamentary critics proved wrong.) By 1642 ritual acts were more controversial than ever. English parishioners had long been used to ministers who rejected traditional ceremonies, but some now endured a clergy which ...”