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“... to be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”

“... from Thomas Shapcott (who may be Australian – we aren’t told) and from Peter Bland (probably, by the same token, a New Zealander); and from U. A. Fanthorpe (two). One of the Fanthorpe poems gets, reasonably enough, the third prize of £500, Bland gets £250, Eaton, Ditmas and Beeson get £100 apiece. Below these again, by my ...”

“... it in his three big notebooks bought for 18/6 at ‘the Press Office in Smith Street’ in St Peter Port); but also ‘of’ in the sense of ‘made into’. It is Ebenezer made into a book. (Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude comes to mind, with its paper-baler who is finally baled up himself.) William Golding put it admirably when he said: ‘To ...”

“... learn a trade,’ he chose his. His father thought, a sculptor was a ‘kind of high-class stone-mason. He learned they received a good salary.’ So there was no objection. He failed to get into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and did not pursue other connections (with, for example, the animal sculptor Barye). But at the Petite Ecole de Dessin – a trade school ...”

“... to China – for example, by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and by the Chevalier Ramsay (another Mason). Perhaps Fischer von Erlach’s admiration for Solomon’s Temple, combined with his interest in oriental architecture, could be accounted for on similar lines. When he lived in Rome, Rykwert tells us, Fischer moved in the same circle as Kircher. Besides ...”

“... in April 1976 and Jim Callaghan’s replacement of Rees at the Northern Ireland Office with Roy Mason marked a major change in policy. Mason treated Northern Ireland as a straightforward security problem and the IRA as common criminals. His policies led to a sharp reduction in violence, but tackled symptoms rather than ...”

“... not so ingrained in our counterparts abroad). Much as, in Rosemary Hill’s words, a 17th-century mason, ‘however skilled, had a status roughly on a par with a farmer’, musicians were not scholars and gentlemen until the age of Stanford, Parry and Elgar.The practical effect of this class distinction was to delay until the late 19th century any hope of ...”

“... of Parnell and Casement. Clever readers of a certain type may object that Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield made rods for their own backs, dug their own graves, committed various sins of hubris and all the rest of it. Milne himself takes an honest and open line in favour of the NUM’s all-out strategy for the defence of the coalfields and the ...”

“... with the young Catherine (both in officers’ uniforms) at the head of the Army that deposed Tsar Peter and made Catherine Empress. On a tour of Europe she had met Voltaire and Diderot, and been acclaimed as an intellectual and liberator. Back in St Petersburg, she was appointed by the Empress as the first Director of the Russian Academy of Science. By the ...”

“... Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey ...”

“... wheel of a splendid motor (‘a shimmering AC’, according to Joseph Connolly), looking like Lord Peter Wimsey. Connolly also records that Wodehouse crashed this car, in the Ukridge manner, and never drove again. But let that pass. Herbert Warren Wind is a serious man. Here is his most serious sentence – and I am not smiling now. ‘During the Second World ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... work with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney ...”

“... Purgatory, while only one is in Paradise. This is John XXI, but among the blessed he is hailed as Peter of Spain, a notable logician – with no hint of his high office. Corbett sees a ‘pamphlet-like immediacy’ in Dante’s view of the papacy, as he held not just that individual popes were sinners, but that the institution itself was profoundly ...”

“... conspicuous if not the most talented writer ever to live in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her household at Mason Croft, the grand building on Church Street that now houses the Shakespeare Institute, included not only her lesbian partner but a gondolier, brought from Venice with his boat to chauffeur them elegantly up and down the Avon.Did Corelli really believe that ...”