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“... Lonsdale makes a point of the gratuitous nastiness of his attack on the impoverished Elizabeth Thomas, whose poetic name ‘Corinna’, bestowed by Dryden, is for ever defamed in ‘Curl’s Corinna’. Many women writers refer to the Dunciad, but this satiric epic, which cries out against the phenomenon of the very print culture that made Pope’s success ...”

“... introduced the notion that Robin robbed the rich to give to the poor. It remained for Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to create the figure who underlies the children’s stories and Hollywood epics of modern times. If the development of the legend may thus be traced with relative ease, what lies behind its earliest appearances? The most ambitious attempt to ...”

“... It would have been impossible for Eden to disregard in the same way The Suez Affair by Hugh Thomas – Thomas is the son-in-law of Gladwyn Jebb, who was Ambassador in Paris at the time – or No End of a Lesson by Sir Anthony Nutting, who was Minister of State at the Foreign Office. Both books were published in ...”

“... James Sadler, the balloonists; in King George III, who loved telescopes and music and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary ...”

“... Cobbett, who – not wishing to be imprisoned yet again – fled to America, the Yorkshireman Thomas Wooler, editor of the Black Dwarf, and Hone himself, now the editor of a new periodical, the Reformists’ Register. Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial ...”

“... Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ‘British’ culture, rather than one badged as ‘English’. In the wake of Yeats’s Book of Irish Verse (first published ...”

“... essentially, hinged on those links. Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or ...”

“... The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich(1848), James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904-8). Though she has been considerably influenced by recent theorising, both linguistic and otherwise, Armstrong does not so much wish to deconstruct Victorian poetry as to show how it was already struggling with something like ...”

“... evidence is as sparse as it is for Shakespeare or as voluminous as it is for Sir Walter Scott, it can never be complete. Although some were destroyed and others censored by Cassandra Austen, we have many of the letters that Jane Austen wrote to this sister and a few she wrote to others. It is unlikely that any large body of the letters she received ...”

“... of a great good place to write. Friends and acquaintances pop up for a paragraph and drop out: Thomas Wolfe, Gary Cooper, millionaire sportsmen – a parade of guests at Key West who booze, fish, admire the great man and leave. To Reynolds’s Hemingway nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read ...”

“... But while Byron was disowned by the Victorians, embarrassed that this ‘huge sulky dandy’, as Thomas Carlyle called him, should have received so much adoration and respect, Felicia Hemans’s reputation grew, and her work went out of print only after the First World War. Her importance in dictating the taste for patriotism, obedience and sacrifice in ...”

“... in Latin, licentia. This sort of freedom has descended to us via the plea to the king from Thomas More when he was Speaker of the House of Commons that every MP should enjoy the liberty ‘freely … and boldly to declare his advice’ – a privilege that survives today in the liberty of MPs to utter words in the chamber which, if repeated ...”

“... student in Anglo-Saxon and philology. Later a series of women writers and editors – Evelyn Scott, Caroline Gordon, Katherine White, Eve Auchincloss – would offer nurture and support. But Stafford never had much respect for women. The women writers she admired show up in marginal, often diminished ways in the biographies. She named her cat George ...”

“... once-great names with scant ceremony, interpreting Fielding as too like his own Squire Western, Scott as a mere Border balladeer. Richardson and Dickens, though allowed some merit, were kept out of the limelight. Even within the oeuvres of the favoured George Eliot, James and Conrad, Leavis went in for a further process of separating wheat from chaff, so ...”

“... road to Eglinton was clogged for thirty miles as 100,000 commoners (it was said) gathered to watch Scott’s romances brought to life. But within a few hours a raging storm sent them slogging homeward through morasses of mud, and the blue-blooded cast and audience, their Medieval hair-dos now sodden and lank, retreated into marquees that leaked water at every ...”