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“... 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not ...”

“... Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative enterprise. One ...”

“... The 20th century has seen several biographies of the last of the four, much the best of which is Christopher Hibbert’s two-volume study published nearly thirty years ago. The late E.A. Smith, who sadly died between the writing and the publication of this biography, thought that all previous studies were ‘to some degree superficial, and most follow the ...”

“... as Delooz puts it) to perceive sanctity, while others are not. ‘Tuscan hill towns,’ Weinstein and Bell inform us, ‘tended to provide the setting for guilt-ridden conversions of adolescent girls, while Rhine-landers seem to have been inclined to venerate great bishops who had been pious and obedient boys.’ Individuals were ...”

“... and longed for fame. But he was a coterie writer, making masques and pageants while Eliot and Christopher Fry ventured into the West End and even onto Broadway. His status as cult author befits a man so fond of secret societies and clubs. His poems require exegesis and notes; esoteric thought suffuses the work. His own literary criticism seems to hold ...”

“... Revolution. Defoe boasted of wearing a mourning ring that had been given at the funeral of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister beheaded in 1653 for his part in a plot to overthrow Cromwell. Defoe mentions Love in his 1704 pamphlet The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge – it is reprinted in W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank’s excellent ...”

“... each of his themed chapters. We are given successive snapshots of various British defeats (Majuba Hill, Spion Kop, Suez), massacres (the Indian and Jamaican rebellions of 1857 and 1865, and Amritsar), plus more peaceful incidents in which the British played up, but hardly played the game. Thus the tale of poor Sir Hector MacDonald, Commander-in-Chief of the ...”

“... to be a skilful interviewer as well, with a varied roster of guests including the directors Walter Hill and Larry Clark, the actresses Anne Heche and Illeana Douglas, and the uncontainable Kanye West. His conversations with fellow novelists and screenwriters are among the best I’ve heard, insider sessions of literary shoptalk that discuss the mechanics of ...”

“... before one day Bardens looked out of his fifth-floor office window in Alexandra Palace, on its hill above the North London suburbs, and saw the capital winking and humming to the south. ‘I suddenly thought, “Bugger it,”’ he remembers here, ‘“Panorama, that’s the title.”’ The first edition was a disaster. To make the programme as ...”

“... the Thames by the foot-passenger ferry, and strolling past Pope and Swift’s old hangout, Marble Hill House, I began to feel progressively unburdened. By the time we were trolling up the long grim suburban avenue that links the River Crane to Feltham I was entering a familiar blissful zone: every manky, run-down semi we passed seemed imbued with profound ...”

“... over and Peter was pronounced living for a day or two more. We, Doris’s staples, Roger, Chloe, Christopher and I, took it in turns to wait outside the ICU, to be called, although we all said we were doing it for Doris not Peter, who had failed to draw any warmth from us. What was his quality of life? The big question from the doctor who made the big ...”

“... emotionally as well as intellectually. Who would not sympathise with the long-serving priest Christopher Trychay, trying amid the upheavals of four reigns to hang on to his parishioners, his income, his integrity and his vestments? The people of Morebath do not seem to have been eager for reform, or change of any kind. In Duffy’s view, the reign of ...”

“... A fortnight later, the Coldstreamers found themselves raked by gunfire near the summit of a wooded hill. Dazed by malaria, Lieutenant Christopher Bulteel witnessed men leaping from blazing fires; stick grenades being hurled from previously invisible trenches; and sickening scenes of hand-to-hand fighting. As Bulteel and his ...”

“... 1923. It’s like Isherwood’s retrospective marvelling, as he sets off to America at the end of Christopher and His Kind, at the unknown future and the unknown life partner who await him: ‘He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.’ Forster seems never ...”

“... in 1880, and set at an angle to the main road from Hampstead into town, on the corner of Hampstead Hill Gardens, one of those circuitous side-roads designed to fit buildings into an existing road network and acting as a short-cut to nowhere. The front is Victorian Gothic, in creeper-strangled red brick, with a pointed, many-faceted, slate-tiled roof which ...”