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“... Colette neglected her only daughter, born in 1913, when she was married to her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, though she had plenty of time for Henry’s son from his first marriage, Bertrand, whom she seduced in 1920, when he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with ...”

“... realisation that it is the very impossibility of her youthful emotion that makes it so intense. Henry James could have imagined the scene with a similar sympathy, yet he could never have brought himself to ‘do’ it in a novel. The quiet contrast between the onion-eating young man who makes the sisters giggle and the romantic would-be scholar who has ...”

“... but the ‘way out of the impasse’ that was ‘available to Wilson’. (The Wilson concerned is Henry. To find out his dates, 1863-1934, I had to turn to a good book, Alastair Service’s Edwardian Architecture.) But there’s no guessing whether it was the past or evidence from it that science excavated, let alone whether Mr Harbison supposes ...”

“... insults are to be gleaned from Wintle and Kenin’s Dictionary of Biographical Quotation: Henry Channon called him ‘that old pink petulant walrus’; Gertrude Stein compared him to ‘a very prosperous Mellon’s Food baby’; and Oscar Wilde found his face ‘vague, formless, obscene’. So it is a comfort to find all these cruelties belied in the ...”

“... and civic libraries emerged after the traumatic dispersal of monastic libraries under Henry VIII: the Bodleian opened in 1602; Sion College was founded in 1630 for Anglican clergy; Humphrey Chetham’s public library in Manchester, which still bears his name, opened in 1653; and there were new town libraries in Ipswich (1599), Norwich (1608) and ...”

“... on with great resistance in the mortuary and religious marketplaces. Bishops and dismal traders, green-burialists and estate agents were among the most vocal naysayers. Law and order sorts worried that foul play might go for ever undetected if corpses were cremated. Parsons quotes a sermon given by the Bishop of Lincoln in Westminster Abbey on 5 July ...”

“... on 18 September 1905, into a family of storytellers and intellectuals. Her paternal grandfather, Henry de Mille, was an Episcopal minister who became a playwright, one of the theatre producer David Belasco’s first collaborators. He discouraged his sons William and Cecil from going into the theatre but they didn’t listen. William de Mille, Agnes’s ...”

“... judging, doing something verboten. As a cure for a nervous breakdown, if you can’t afford ‘a Henry James one’, she prescribes shocking the seller at Tiffany by ordering garishly coloured notepaper.Of course, what I ought to have gotten was ‘Ecru-White Kid’ with black engraving or, at worst, dark green or brown ...”

“... be said. Sculpture in England is a special case. I shall put it aside, essentially, till I come to Henry Moore, whose room in the Tate exhibition is far and away the strongest. But simply this, for the present: sculpture had the advantage, it seems to me, if our subject is metropolitan taste, of being always a less mannerly, more laborious art. It was a ...”

“... Rise, the first volume, came out in 1939, followed by Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943. She wanted them to be published as fiction, which OUP didn’t do; her editor labelled them ‘autobiography’ instead. This proved frustrating for historians – it turned out that some of her facts were invented and characters conflated – and ...”

“... opened the way for that celebrated trio of the late 19th century, Crane, Caldecott and Kate Green-away – vigorous, sportive and quaint respectively. Whalley and Chester note the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements on these and other styles of illustration, and show how Caldecott, in particular, affected later water-colourists like ...”

“... fact, Hanta himself is paper, pâpier-maché compacted from beer and old books and mouse nests and green and blue and metallic and ‘cobalt-coloured’ flesh flies (courtesy of wodges of kindly donated butchers’ paper), a palimpsest, a cento, a mummy, a dummy, putting his best (or is it his worst?) side forward. Materials – thoughts – come to mind and ...”

“... of the soul, like the followers of Pythagoras, and they had what would now be identified as ‘green’ elements, worshipping not in stone temples but in sacred groves, their totem plants being oak and mistletoe, the latter harvested by druids in white robes wielding golden sickles. Lucan combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired ...”

“... from Midland’; ‘the Undersecretary for Imperial Affairs’; ‘but, first, back to Henry Ford’; ‘she quoted Pound’. A mirror to the species. Joseph has written five books of his stark and beautiful poems, from Shouting at No One (1983) to So Where Are We? (2017), and one strange book of prose, Lawyerland (1997), a sort of La Ronde for the ...”

“... at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want ...”