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“... to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the ...”

“... doctrinal teaching concerned the untrustworthiness of such poetic usages. Auden himself, a great Lewis Carroll fan, would possibly have said that Mendelson gets away with it by paying the images extra; and the prose does have at moments a slightly expensive quality.Carpenter tends to run into the opposite problem: not so much of overvaluing symbols as of ...”

“... much as she ever moved, during her years in Brazil, among an elite set. Her letters to Lowell in Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton’s well-annotated volume throw interesting light on those years in Brazil. It is clear from the letters in One Art, the wonderful selection of her correspondence edited by Robert Giroux, that she found great happiness ...”

“... A noble tomb. His son John was also many times MP. As Sir William sat as fellow MP for Oxford with Thomas Chaucer, I was naturally on familiar terms with him and startled even Rowse by giving his alabaster cheek a great smacking kiss. To the north of the north aisle of the short nave is a Palladian chapel built to house the family pew of the Perrots, and their ...”

“... photograph of Raymond has as its gratuitously spiteful caption a quotation from Dafydd-Ellis Thomas, ‘the best-cut tweeds on the Left’. Still more gratuitous is the sneering caption which Inglis has dreamed up for a photograph of Raymond and Joy, taken in 1940-1 during their courting days – the kind of loving picture which would not look out of ...”

“... a mirror on the opposite wall. There is a tendency to discuss these pictures as documentary. Thomas Kennedy writes in the Tate catalogue that Sickert is offering ‘realistic representations of people who visited music halls … His works show how people unconsciously engage with the social performative act of being part of an audience.’ But though the ...”

“... her first in any language.The most eloquent invocation of the seedy set-up was made by the poet Thomas Hood, who used Crachami’s exhibition to illustrate the price of fame, or of visibility, even in a person who was hardly visible to begin with. (Hood may have had in mind a sketch by John Augustus Atkinson which shows a man standing in the doorway of a ...”

“... should not really be discouraging to anybody over the age of 18.’ It was easy to argue, as Lewis Mumford did, that Jacobs’s lack of interest in poverty and the realities of slum life was the result of romanticism, that she was what would later be called a ‘gentrifier’, a middle-class incomer dazzled by the big city and making it her own. In one ...”

“... and pouncing upon the first occasion helpfully to get at me’. Both James in his stories and Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924) understood the power which ghosts and séance scenes held in the imaginations of their readers. During the First World War, as Maddox says, ‘grieving millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages ...”

“... before?Not a biographer. I’d written studies, including a biographical thing about the poet Alun Lewis years earlier.I remember that: it was the preface of the collection of his stories and poems you edited.Yes, it’s quite a long piece. It took ages and involved the conventional sort of research, going to see his widow and so on. I’d done that many years ...”

“... an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do ...”

“... at a house in the Village, and that they had Red Bread and Red Drink.’ Another accuser, Mercy Lewis, said: ‘they did eat Red Bread like Mans Flesh, and would have her eat some: but she would not.’ Like Psellos, the Salem authorities believed that they had stumbled on a diabolic conspiracy: ‘These witches, whereof above a score have now ...”

“... American, originally published in 1955, the insights in which still bite. Greene’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist who smokes opium, keeps a teenage Vietnamese mistress named Phuong and sounds like Greene himself, is befriended by Alden Pyle, a quiet young American who is trying to build a Third Force, neither Communist nor ...”

“... sterling fell so far that it couldn’t be given away on the black market.The queue outside the Thomas Cook office curled around several blocks – women, mostly, desperately trying to secure passage in one of the very few ships leaving from Port Said. Micheline got berths on the troopship Queen Elizabeth. On 18 July, she left with her daughters from ...”

“... sex had – has – always been shadowed by threat, by violence, by shame and by death. In 1823 Thomas Buttle was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a ...”