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“... Ireland has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in realism in the same way that a nation might be deficient in hospitality or human rights. This is because realism is one of those terms which can be both normative and descriptive, like ‘nature’ or ‘culture ...”

“... ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then Henry V), infuriatingly self-indulgent kings lost it (Richard II, then Henry VI). The uselessness of the two latter monarchs had led to their murder by ambitious would-be replacements; nobility had been so unimpressed by the victims’ performance on the throne that they stood aside and let the assassinations ...”

“... and by the Peace of Amiens in 1803, while Hazlitt was carrying on his Jacobin campaign against English conservatism and Benthamite radicalism down to the 1820s. The central issue around which everything rotates is the French national character, and whether there was something in it that caused the Revolution, and doomed the Revolution; and if so, what that ...”

“... quarrelling, though it’s not been like that during the last quarter of a century. Another English person who has rather bleaker memories of those first few days after the coup has written about them in a memoir of her husband that has just been reissued in paperback.* Joan Jara had lived in Chile for nearly twenty years. She, too, was familiar with ...”

“... discredited it in the public mind. In her exhaustively researched and coolly detached account of English spiritualism, Janet Oppenheim is less interested in those who came to scoff than in those who remained to subscribe. She estimates that from its beginnings in the 1850s down to the First World War, spiritualism attracted, at the very most, a hundred ...”

“... suggests itself. The attempt to breathe new life into the chivalric ideal began at the moment when English society, seeking to recuperate from the feverish libertinism of the Regency and the earlier, somewhat more elegant amorality of the Whig aristocracy, experienced the growing burden of reawakened moral responsibility that marked the emergence of ...”

“... soul of their culture,’ even though he has stated that few Sioux today speak Dakota or Lakota. English is their lingua franca, and he has shown the culture to be resilient and vibrant with or without the Dakota and Lakota languages. In part his reversal has to do with the current politics of Indian country, which have taken on an essentialist tinge, but ...”

“... Papal approval. Edward had deliberately cultivated the Papacy, receiving Papal legates and sending English bishops to Papal councils. The Abbey was a monument to these links with Rome. According to the early hagiographies, Edward, like many other Saxon kings, had pledged himself to make a pilgrimage to the Holy See. When his barons protested at the political ...”

“... light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray happily declared the very attitudes to poetic diction that Wordsworth was later to detect and condemn. ‘The language of the age is never the language of poetry,’ he observed. By which he meant that it never should be. ‘Our poetry ...”

“... Richard Cobden is not a man for all seasons, but his life, career and values have been interpreted in widely different ways at different times. When he died in 1865, he was mourned by many as a secular saint. The majority remembered his leadership of one of the most triumphantly successful pressure groups in British history, the Anti-Corn Law League; and a minority honoured his uncompromising and frequently unpopular opposition to war: ‘seldom has hero rested, stained by so superb a fault ...”

“... survived as long as the Empire itself, but otherwise Seeley was neglected until in recent years Richard Shannon and Sheldon Rothblatt both identified him as a leading figure in the reorientation of the Victorian élite. Plainly there was scope for an intellectual biography to match the ideas to the man, and the task was undertaken as a PhD by Deborah ...”

“... Pound’s own life story, the text needs to be glossed in order to be read at all. The annotation Richard Sieburth has provided is ample without being fussy, and his introductory essay offers an informative account of the sequence’s genesis, themes, methods and critical reception (not least from the judges who awarded it the prestigious Bollingen Prize, in ...”

“... Biographia Literaria, which he subtitled Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Richard Holmes, by reputation anyway, is different; and certainly his magnificent life of Shelley makes time, in the course of unravelling the threads of Shelley’s emotional, intellectual and imaginative life, to introduce its readers to writings that most of ...”

“... elegantly demonstrates how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”