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“... its stranglehold on Victorian Oxford and Cambridge, whatever was happening in Göttingen – and William Morris’s many poems, romances and saga translations. Morris, indeed, perhaps deserves more space. He kept up with the scholarship, travelled in Iceland, knew the languages first-hand, and created a semi-socialist ...”

“... the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s future first secretary of defence, who thought that Theranos blood tests would be a ‘game changer’ in battlefield medicine. Naturally, all those men would be useful when it came to ...”

“... world of the earlier 20th century (Evans compared a fragment of Minoan painting to a piece of Morris wallpaper). But later in the century, artists, film-makers and novelists (notably Mary Renault) in their turn found inspiration in what he and his team had created. There are very few movies set in the heroic age of Greece that do not derive their ...”

“... like this, concentrated in throwaway bits of the story. In a footnote on the girth of President William Howard Taft, he says the man was ‘famous as the president who got stuck in a bathtub, which is easy to picture, but hard to picture clearly’. ‘I knew the kid who lived there,’ he says about a mansion in his home town. ‘His father had a handlebar ...”

“... Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only ...”

“... time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with the old ...”

“... the author follows the glow in the dark across the work of several novelists – Remarque, Mailer, William Styron, Hemingway – confirms this. ‘I have noted all the cigarettes that are crushed out, thrown away or unlit at night, shared and hoarded, detested and loved – instruments of torture and surgery, tokens of friendship and signs of love – in ...”

“... Lee went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, she sent him pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5. Nancy Morris, who wore the cast-off suits of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, would have brought a dash of something altogether different. ‘She is absolutely uncultured,’ her lover Alix Strachey explained. In the end, alongside HD, Sayers and Woolf, Wade ...”

“... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...”

“... get more for himself. He knew and admired Hastings, and was a friend of the great orientalist Sir William Jones, scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, and, as Mr Jones, a member of the Club, present at Boswell’s election. When Johnson first wrote to Hastings on 30 March 1774, recommending to him the future Sir Robert Chambers, one of his Majesty’s Judges in ...”

“... pamphleteering and market-gardening. He was influenced by Marx, by a range of socialist thinkers (Morris, of course) and by anarchism (Kropotkin, pre-eminently). He collected ‘chants of labour’ and set them to music (there is a parallel here with the Eagleton of ‘The Ballad of English Literature’). Carpenter perhaps showed the graduate student that it ...”

“... like Blake, Poe, Browning and many others; those he brought to self-attention, like Swinburne, Morris, Burne-Jones; and everyone from Whistler to Yeats – there were many – whose imaginations were shifted or shaped by his ideas and practice. Though not much now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a ...”

“... he was perhaps not wholly aware of himself, I’d probably done him a favour of precisely the kind William Blake advocated. I didn’t have quite the gall to mention Blake but that was more or less my tack: what I’d written would help him out. Not too awful as these exchanges go, but not one likely to ennoble either of us in the history of ...”

“... recognised themselves. Not all were weird or wild: I was surprised to read that Christopher Morris, later a friendly colleague of mine, correctly identified himself and his wife as the ‘darling dodos’ of the excellent story that provided the title of Wilson’s second volume. This account of him inevitably raises the question why, with all his ...”

“... vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used: so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service.In 1628, colonists at Merrymount, not far from Plymouth Plantation, did exactly as ...”