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“... Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both. ‘WMF … is the most inscrutable of men – he will never pose long enough for the Camera of Identification.’ Marion Mainwaring, in Mysteries of ...”

“... to his anthology The New Poetry, which promoted Hughes and Plath over the stodgy Movement), Edward Lucie-Smith and, terrifyingly, Michael Horovitz, the editor of ‘one of the decade’s genuinely polemical anthologies: Children of Albion (1969)’. Stevenson’s fondness for Prynne over Larkin is less offensive than his reasons for dismissing ...”

“... experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then in his early forties, but his ...”

“... Felix Volkhovsky, Stepniak and Kropotkin, whose beard covered his solar plexus. Her marriage to Edward Garnett was celibate after the birth of their only child, David or Bunny. Constance suffered a prolapse of the uterus and thereafter wore some kind of internal support. After a time Edward, with Constance’s ...”

“... Asked​ in an exam at the age of 16 whether kings should be elected, the future Edward VII answered: ‘It is better than hereditary right because you have more chance of having a good sovereign, if it goes by hereditary right if you have a bad or weak sovereign, you cannot prevent him reigning.’ By Bertie’s feeble standards, this was a flash of insight ...”

“... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...”

“... Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet ...”

“... were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his verse. Tennyson called him ‘old Fitz’, patronised him, and accepted from him quite large sums of money, being subsidised at one point to the tune of three hundred a year, a large figure in ...”

“... model of a tightly related British intellectual aristocracy driving the national culture, and Edward Shils’s celebration of postwar Britain as a haven for intellectuals (‘Outside the China of the Mandarins, no great society has ever had a body of intellectuals so integrated with, and so congenial to, its ruling class, and so combining civility and ...”

“... script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on Back’ – appeared to float unabashed on a sea of London scrawls. For a few days after the explosions, the atmosphere was bad on the buses. Passengers were looking into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from King’s ...”

“... understand her specific role in Bloomsbury, and what differentiated her from others in the group. James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us an opportunity to think anew about these questions, condensing, as it does, twenty years of scholarship and research since Quentin Bell’s classic two-volume Life came out in the early ...”

“... close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that preceded it. Henry James​ , who was fascinated by Browning, spoke in an obituary piece about ‘the bristling surface of his actuality’: stylistically, the poetry is full of bristles, musically rough and jagged, full of dashes and exclamation marks, syntactically ...”

“... of secrets, whispers, unanswered telephones, Anne Frank’s house, Albert Schweitzer’s music, Edward Lear as ‘dream companion’. These are the kind of poems a good poet would write if his ‘one idea’ for the moment were that everything in the world wants to be a message. Rain in London wants to ‘whisper’. A shaken duster waves ...”

“... David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden ...”

“... convenience. Its methodology is lies. An atmospheric scientist once told me that he had checked Edward Teller’s projections of the amount of fallout that would reach Americans during the years of above-ground nuclear testing in southern Nevada. The great genius had somehow left off some zeros, reducing the impact a hundred or a thousandfold, while other ...”