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“... ecclesiastical tradition. The high point was reached more than three hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Browne published his Religio Medici, and Johnson’s indebtedness to this tradition is seen best in his borrowing of two habits common to such books: the sarcastic ridiculing of all secular opposition and a pious refusal to believe that atheism really ...”

“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... republicanism in recent years might be thought to have stimulated interest in Milton, but here Thomas Corns, editor of A Companion to Milton, sounds a warning note. This collection of essays, he writes, appears at a time when Milton’s standing with a wide readership appears ‘altogether more insecure’. In the US students prefer to study contemporary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... also means the popular and the recondite, are characteristic of the poetry of any age. But, as Hugh Kenner points out in a typically brilliant if somewhat perverse essay called simply ‘Responsibilities’, Davie’s concern for poetic language is really a concern for culture as the modern equivalent of theology. ‘The Englishman who was pulled in the ...”

“... Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain rose,’ Merrill wrote years later in his memoir A ...”

“... to grant Pound heroic status from the outset is unwise. Moody nowhere says that Pound read Thomas Carlyle, but Carlyle’s notion of a church of literature taking the place of the Christian Church, and his emphasis on the importance of ‘The Hero as Poet’ (with Dante as the foundational example) and ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (culminating in ...”

“... by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an elaborate bomb factory in Birmingham, the Crown charged him and other followers of O’Donovan Rossa with treason. (The plan, it seems, had been to ...”

“... to belong to a British literature, and that many of his favourite poets wrote in English. And, as Thomas Crawford has shown, much of the folk repertoire he studied was common to both the northern and southern halves of the island. It is also true that Scots and English are branches of the same language, and that Burns was not, in the customary meaning of the ...”

“... concerns have started to make their presence more strongly felt in the United States, and in Hugh Grady’s forthcoming The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford) the ideological underpinnings and the literary and political roots of academic literary criticism on both sides of the Atlantic will be at the centre of the ...”

“... the former occupant. The 1901 Thom’s lists the pork butcher at 1-2 South William Street as being Thomas Gribben (p. 1551). Bernard Ferenbach (Joyce misspelled his name) was a pork butcher directly across the street at 68 South William Street (Thom’s 1901, p. 1551), but this had closed by 1903, since the 1904 Thom’s lists that property as vacant ...”

“... to plunder Ireland, under the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Birmingham newspaper, ‘made even hardened pressmen gasp.’ Party stalwarts like Morrison and Hugh Dalton resented him, but then they didn’t have his looks. The Daily Mail carried a report of a meeting in the Midlands where ‘a series of quarrels were in progress among the audience about whether Mr Mosley was a duke, a knight or a commoner. The ...”

“... reminds us that the body is rather more grotesque than we usually imagine. In Transparent Things, Hugh Person is locked to Armande after one display of tenderness – unique, as it turns out, but curiously binding: ‘He loved her in spite of her unlovableness.’ Lolita surely began as another novel of this kind, with this difference – that the object of ...”