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“... of kings and princes may be more celebrated, and we may have far more records relating to the major aristocratic families, but the Paston letters supply individual voices. The correspondence extends over four generations of both men and women – indeed, her letters make Margaret Paston, wife of John Paston I, one of ...”

“... to China’s national pride, and the restoration of Hong Kong to the motherland was seen as a major achievement. The civilised manner in which it had been engineered was also meant to demonstrate to the world China’s new-found maturity, its coming in from the cold after decades of turmoil. With Hong Kong under their belts, China’s leaders could now ...”

“... but it has few ways to silence critics on the internet. When pro-Israel forces clashed with a major political figure in the past, that person usually backed off. Jimmy Carter, who was smeared by the lobby after he published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was the first prominent American to stand his ground and fight back. The lobby has been unable to ...”

“... missing, in terms of the canon? I can’t think of a single great sequence set in a dream in any major novel. Pretty much by definition, dreams don’t tell you much about plot or character, so their primary function in fiction is as mood-music. This is often how Nabokov uses them, as a form of emotional syncopation, a kind of psychological off-beat. It may ...”

“... straightforward Americans should not be seduced by European affectations, but as in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’, that most disturbing and effective of all his tales, the symbolism grows and expands like a shapely but slightly sinister magic, and eats up the allegory. There is something enigmatic-naive about Hawthorne, as in the best original fairy ...”

“... enhanced. McDowell’s peacocks are frequently dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, from Don John of Austria to the ‘tartan cowboy’, and he understates the sexual electricity of the uncoloured Victorian period – of the black and grey peacocks of the high 19th century. He prefers to think about cavalry officers and suggests that their bright colours ...”

“... domestic reception and the larger diplomatic and economic environment. But as late as 2009, a major collection of essays on the reign could still be entitled Who Was Henry VII?, and the sense that the king was an ‘enigma’ (Cunningham), paradoxically ‘unfashionable’ despite his location in the trendy ‘liminality’ of the end of the 15th century ...”

“... Portraits: Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys, at the Courtauld until 21 January. They span the major part of Soutine’s working life, and show the evolution of his style. One of the earliest, a painting of a butcher’s boy, was made at Céret in 1919. At least, it is titled Butcher Boy – there is no real way of knowing who or what the sitter was. It ...”

“... philosophy and been effective public spokesmen for the secular and liberal causes of their day. John Stuart Mill was one such, and Bertrand Russell another. In our own time, the latest and perhaps the last of this chain of great figures has been Sir Alfred Ayer. Ayer shares with Russell and with Mill not only an intellectual allegiance to empiricist ...”

“... gives a voice to a group who are not generally believed to have (or to be entitled to) one, while John Conroy’s account is that of a sympathetic outsider nervously learning the codes and concerns of a small Catholic community at the eye of the storm. At the academic level, the heightened interest in Irish history in England has found a focus in the dynamic ...”

“... rare and small-scale occurrences, swept traditional proletarian regions this summer, and won major concessions from the authorities. In short, public opinion, until now merely a potential ally for the reform movement, has become a force in its own right. And for the first time since his election as General Secretary in March 1985, Gorbachev has begun to ...”

“... nothing but a neat reversal of the story of Lolita.’ And it explains why incest is the ‘major theme’ in the subsequent fiction. Another major theme is that of the ‘bend sinister’ or bastardy, and Field has an ancestral explanation for that, as well. He ventilates with some relish the court and family rumours ...”

“... his father (murdered) most of his family dispersed into various exiles’. Nabokov was the only major writer of the century to have fled both Communism and Nazism; his life had its share of dispossessions and close escapes. Bolshevik machine guns were strafing the harbour in Sebastopol when the Nabokovs left Russia for the last time. Twenty-one years ...”

“... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...”

“... never heard him utter a harsh word.’ Admirers and antagonists agree that, more than any other major literary critic, Leavis’s influence was exerted through teaching. His classes were mostly devoted to the close analysis of particular passages, the purpose being to detect sincerity, vitality – as Byatt has it, ‘authenticity’. Leavis owed much to ...”