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“... Fernande had been the second wife of Yourcenar’s proud father, Michel de Crayencour: the young daughter subsequently enjoyed sisterly or motherly relationships with her father’s ‘mistresses or quasi-mistresses and later his third wife’. As a septuagenarian in 1974, Yourcenar noted that she was more than twice as old as Fernande had been in ...”

“... who amassed one of the finest private libraries in the country. Born the fifth child of seven, the young Michael grew up among a veritable forest of Foots, all passionately committed to the Liberal verities in a household where a radical Whig sense of history, literature and rhetoric was not just part of the furniture but pretty much what life was for. Most of ...”

“... butter. It makes the breast moist and the skin crisp and flavourful’), another in which a thin young woman buys a giant scone from a wholefood bakery (‘one scone, a single thing . . . a loaf of a scone . . . a dry, crumbly endeavour’). Such moments, however, are characteristic only in the dry, almost campy, precision of the rendered ...”

“... some two hundred pages – to Welles’s career before the movies. He reminds us that the young Welles was an immense theatre and radio star by the mid-Thirties. Radio had a regular peak audience of 60 million. Double-bills were interrupted in cinemas at 7 p.m. while a large console radio was set up in front of the screen, so that audiences could ...”

“... unconsciously needing a man’s hand, that of the phantom Mr Rochester or the real curate, Arthur Bell Nichols, who was still to come. And Emily seems in her own unwilling way to have also been the imaginative catalyst in their world. Katherine Frank makes the interesting point that both Charlotte and Anne, in their second published novels, drew ...”

“... and George Devine returned to acting. When they talked about forming a theatre company neither the young Tony Richardson nor the much older Devine knew what they wanted: ‘a new theatre – he didn’t know what. I wanted a new theatre too, and I didn’t know how,’ Richardson writes. But if the ambitious young Oxford ...”

“... the British sausage. His life has been pitched at an agreeable social and professional level. As a young man he danced four nights running at Holyrood Palace with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, something he says he had ‘entirely forgotten’ until he found in his papers a ‘Dear Ludo’ letter from Princess Elizabeth thanking him for his wedding ...”

“... name as Madonna? Could it be the teenage murder of a half-brother, the abandonment of his young wife to his enemies to save his skin, the execution of his closest friend, a blood-brother since childhood, by dismemberment, and (in all probability) the poisoning of his eldest son as well? This all sounds much more like Renaissance Italy than the ...”

“... to change the contours of ancient Greek literature. Between 1896 and 1907, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the ancient rubbish dumps at Oxyrhynchos, in Upper Egypt; hundreds of lost literary texts emerged, together with unprecedented information about the people who read and eventually discarded them.* Authors who had been little more than ...”

“... the completion of Dubliners, the transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the composition of Exiles and Giacomo Joyce, and the beginning of Ulysses. He returned briefly to Dublin in 1919-20, but by 1915 his artistic soul was forged. The Trieste decade, it seems, has not received its due. Ellmann devotes more than a quarter ...”

“... Krieg, and that their pre-emptive attack at Pearl Harbor was no more infamous than that on Port Arthur, so universally applauded in Britain and the United States, at the outset of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. In any case, the memory of Pearl Harbor has been blotted out for the Japanese, with the connivance of Anglo-American bien-pensants, by that of ...”

“... life. Others would be too good-mannered to notice things which embarrass Adrian. In the world of Arthur Ransome’s children parents hardly figure as characters. Their role is to establish the absolute security outside the plot which can make the adventures within it seem both realistic and safe. No possible turn of a Ransome story would allow ...”

“... thinks) disadvantageous terms. What keeps her going is concern for her ‘boys’. The elder, Arthur, graduates as a tax-inspector, immune from call-up, and marries his landlady’s daughter in Ulster. Cliff, the younger, something of an ‘odd boy’ who writes poetry when depressed, is called up and shunted from one arm of the Services to another. The ...”

“... are now virtually unheard of. Sometimes weeks go by without a meaningful vote. Many MPs have young families to whom they are anxious to return, and constituents and constituency parties expect a great deal more from their elected representative than they used to. Long gone are the days when an MP could get away with a quarterly visit to his ...”

“... classicism designed to negate the lachrymose effusions of the previous generation’s romanticism. Arthur Symons said of Gautier’s poems that they showed how ‘words could build as strongly as stones’, and wilfulness here carries the sense of chiselling designs out of uncut blocks, a description that captures something of Flaubert’s yelling out sounds ...”