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“... Chagrin et la pitié revealed how many French bureaucrats, officials and policemen had helped to hunt down Jewish families and deport them to their death.In the silence of lockdown, rereading those two Resistance autobiographies alongside Harry Rée’s account has been salutary. I hadn’t realised that de Bénouville was a supporter of the fascistic ...”

“... of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small fish even in the small pond that is British snuff manufacture, though he has another claim to fame: between 2000 and 2003 he appeared with Clarissa Dickson Wright in a BBC series about country ...”

“... own hounds, thereby becoming an early victim of, as it were, friendly fire. It’s not quite The Hunt for Red October, but the quest for Astrid/Artemis in a warring world has enough suspenseful twists and turns, set against many thousand miles of continuously changing geography, to keep the novel racing. Kellas’s travels, by ...”

“... well, at least in the later period: Darwin but not Newton, for instance, W.T. Stead but not Jonathan Swift. The system of cross-reference goes a long way in both remedying and explaining some disparities of treatment. It means that the reader whose thirst for knowledge is not slaked by the entry first consulted can be led on a treasure ...”

“... In ‘Reading Montale’, an essay appended to his translation of the poet’s first three books, Jonathan Galassi considers the old and especially Mediterranean association of poet and cicada and its recurrence in Montale’s poems. Feeble sistrum in the wind of a lost cicada, no sooner touched than done for in the exhaling torpor is how Galassi translates ...”

“... under ‘Religion’. As misrepresentations go, it’s not bad: a deity created in our own image. Jonathan Glover’s book is not exclusively about the Holocaust, but unlike many other atrocities chronicled in this lengthy codex it bags a section to itself, and the culminating one: the Final Solution as grand finale. The book’s subtitle is ‘a moral ...”

“... that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls. Jonathan Cape’s posture is completely understandable given the current funeral atmosphere in England, but the psychic ramifications of Black Dogs are global in reach, and people we know are calling with questions. This is the reason the London Review has made ...”

“... have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In fact, there is more good sense in Bate’s short introduction to the 1987 Oxford edition of the Essays of Elia than in Wilson’s 521 pages. I thought it was ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...”

“... Review, where Betjeman had worked earlier, Pevsner contributed a series called ‘Treasure Hunt’ under the pseudonym Peter F.R. Donner (in theory, to disguise how much of every issue he was writing himself). Still very much the architectural historian, with his references to the style of decorative motifs and examination of plan types, he turned his ...”

“... and sends up its clichés. (It’s hard not to see the comment about ‘zany guides’ as a dig at Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated.) Within the first few chapters, Kaiser’s ‘tiny but nonetheless significant act of Holocaust justice’ starts to look more ambiguous. When he tells friends what he’s doing, he’s surprised at their ...”

“... in this country, too, have been snorkelling in the archives, and the first fruits of their hunt are now presented in From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency, a work which has the virtue of covering the subject from medieval times to the present, even if it is restricted to one nation. Some truths had been accepted since Antiquity. There were those ...”

“... the more militant gesture for gay men. Likewise books that glorify homosexuals as outlaws, like Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence, have caused scarcely a ripple outside the literary critical lagoon, but when John Boswell, a rather old-fashioned medieval historian, claimed to have discovered evidence for gay marriages being celebrated and blessed ...”

“... and several of its sections are set out according to the authors whom Forster assisted: Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Bulwer, Tennyson, Longfellow, Mrs Gaskell, Browning, Landor, Dickens, Carlyle. The jobs which both he and Lewes did for authors were partly ones opened up by two new features of the Victorian literary scene: the multiplication of periodicals with a ...”

“... not the last time that someone would come to grief after offending Parsons. Eighteen months on, Jonathan Taylor claimed to have been attacked in bed by three demonic snakes. He, too, suspected that this was the work of Parsons. Then Taylor started to have ‘fits’. Other accusers came forward. William Branch, a neighbour, attributed his ‘strange ...”