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“... into her bed, and stayed there for the next 22 years. One day​ in 1911, walking with Gertrude Bell, Arthur Benson mentioned to her that the composer Ethel Smyth had once said his mother was ‘as good as God and as clever as the Devil’. She laughed ‘at the profanity of it’, replying: ‘That’s one comfort about all of you – you are not in the ...”

“... was the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I ...”

“... a false narrative, a doorstep is smeared with shit, a dead cat is found hanging from the bell-pull, the words assassins and a mort are daubed on the shop’s blind. The police are only half-helpful: as one investigating officer says to another, ‘It smells of Kraut in here.’ The Krulls decide – not inaccurately – that Hans is the bringer, or ...”

“... the idea that beggary was in most cases the favoured trade of the impotent lush and thieving bawd. Henry VIII’s statute against vagrancy proclaimed that ‘vacabundes and Beggers have of longe tyme increased – dayly do increase’ and allowed that justices of the peace should provide the true poor with limited licences to beg; beggars begging outside these ...”

“... used, possibly for the last time, to sign the deed of surrender handing the abbey over to Henry VIII’s commissioners. Over at Rievaulx we film in the rain and in the cavernous latrine below the monks’ dormitory. With a lighting cameraman this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who ...”

“... to offer us the young lovers’ impressions of the performance they’re witnessing. One thinks of Henry James’s remark in the Preface to Roderick Hudson about the artist’s need to draw a circle around relations that really stop nowhere: the young Roussel seems unaware of this need. Texts like La Seine or Claude et Luce might continue for ...”

“... for dealing with the world crisis. A great borrower, Richards took from the neurologist Henry Head the notion of ‘vigilance’ – ‘what happens in a given stimulus situation varies with the vigilance of the appropriate portion of the nervous system’ – and explained the extraordinary availability of experience to the poet, and his power to ...”

“... told his early lover Pamela Hansford Johnson. ‘I’m like a baby in the dark,’ he explained to Henry Treece, an Apocalyptic poet who wrote the first critical book about him, and with whom Thomas had a long and revealing correspondence. Being infantile was useful as a would-be disarming way of acknowledging his worldly incompetence: ‘These apologies, we ...”

“... exactly in the little they said that Alma read the much that was there.’ The result is closer to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it became a bestseller). The gallery is ...”

“... like all other Americans, no consciousness at all, you would be happier.’ In London, he tells Henry, he would have to ‘fight very hard, in order to survive’, but that would surely be better than having friends notable only for their ‘immaturity of feeling’. Mrs Eliot rather wickedly prints a letter to the poet from a distinguished and aged kinsman ...”

“... dependency like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and Boston’s own) Henry James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable ...”

“... Eventually a younger generation of African-American scholars, prominent among them Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr, came round and paid respects to The Confessions of Nat Turner, and some even designated Styron the inadvertent father of the postmodern slave narrative, but by then he may have been so bruised by the initial beatdown that it wasn’t much ...”

“... difficult for anyone to have a clue what was being said about the state of England with the vile Henry Brooke and Enoch Powell in the cabinet. If a trip into town wasn’t to your hangover’s liking, there was the warm suburban welcome of the Magdala in South End Green in Hampstead’s lower depths, where Ruth Ellis had shot her lover (look, they’ve ...”

“... of the power to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... Most of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at moments ...”