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“... of Lawrence you thought were dead, and the first published photo of Lawrence’s supposed lover, William Henry Hocking. This is surely the most readable, judicious and authoritative scholarly biography of Lawrence yet written. Yet it also presses hard against the limitations of its single-volume narrative format. By embracing Jessie Chambers’s formula that ...”

“... on the screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, mortalised by Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in 1959, had sold over five million books. The ...”

“... that when he became a hat designer, at scarcely twenty years old, he did so semi-anonymously as ‘William J.’ and ‘William Jay’. We see his overwhelming desire to be close to women’s clothes transmuted into the need to know everything about them. He doesn’t reflect on how a flamboyant maker became a self-effacing ...”

“... announced in his newspaper column that he had decided to call his Homosexual Law Reform Bill ‘William’. This was partly because it was about ‘boys’, partly because it was his custom in restaurants to ask for ‘William’ instead of the bill, but giving the Bill a pet name also seems to have been an attempt to ...”

“... Speranza is another foreign novel that may remind us of British genre-parody – especially William Golding’s Rites of Passage, that witty, near-sadistic parody of traditional seafaring yarns. Like Golding’s novel, Speranza begins with the journal of a healthy, self-satisfied, idealistic young gentleman enjoying an adventurous voyage and uttering ...”

“... or 500 lb bomb in each village that speaks out of turn’ would satisfactorily solve the problem. Montgomery, too, was consistent in his ideas. In 1938 he disagreed with the view of his military superiors and the Palestine Government that the Arab rebellion was a national campaign: the rebels were merely ‘professional bandits’ who would be crushed by ...”

“... surrounded himself with new men who had proved their loyalty to him and his family: warriors like William Hastings, who went from mere gentleman to lord in a matter of months, and the Welshman Sir William Herbert, who became earl of Pembroke; and administrators like Thomas Montgomery, the ...”

“... belong in the region they haunt. One ghost has a chapter to herself. In 1755, a gentleman named William Salisbury killed his servant, Anna Dorothea Swarts, by dragging her behind his horse. The jury verdict was the evasive ‘ignoramus’, a term that either ignored the charge entirely or claimed ignorance of its legal merit. Salisbury escaped justice, but ...”

“... halls, judges’ thrones and trapdoors leading to basement cells where a Jack the Ripper suspect, William Piggott, was once held. Gravesend had a history of witch-finding, I was told. ‘If you were an elderly eccentric woman with bad skin, you had particular problems.’ Anne Neale, known as an ‘ill-tongued’ woman, sent for trial in 1675. Such ...”

“... but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.’ The Germans were no fools. General Montgomery feared the worst for Operation Husky, the Sicilian invasion: ‘It will be a hard and very bloody fight. We must expect heavy losses.’ Britain’s practitioners of the black arts, a cast of Ealing comedy characters whom Macintyre describes with ...”

“... not on the poet but the painter that Levi chooses to concentrate. Lear was born in 1812, when Dr William Gilpin’s cult of the picturesque was being vigorously debunked in The Adventures of Doctor Syntax, and the bemused water-colourists who jostled at the viewing-stations in the Lakes had tired of holding up their tinted Claude glasses to reflect and ...”

“... of the recent past, as historians would have them (‘he was now going on about Field Marshal Montgomery, and then Pandit Nehru received an inscrutable mention’ – the inscrutability was no doubt terrific). Eventually, we are brought up to the mid-1950s, with Sir Anthony Eden in a fit of pique brought on by Aitken. Suez ensues. Daniel Green presents a ...”

“... those of other Wykehamists who are remembered there: George Mallory, lost on Everest in 1924, and William Whiting, who wrote the hymn ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’. Archibald Wavell, one of the significant British military commanders of World War Two, as well as the penultimate viceroy of British India, was presented as a role model for the boys in ...”

“... of younger English poets who had heard rumours of Black Mountain College, read their Pound and William Carlos Williams, cannibalised Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), but never experienced a prime specimen of this fascinating otherness. Where Dorn was exceptional, as Prynne points out, in a conversation recorded at a ...”

“... practically the devil incarnate, portrayed in Paulin’s poem ‘The Yellow Spot’ gloating with Montgomery Belgion over the transportation of Jews and (could there be a connection here?) playing his favourite game of trying to find a rhyme for ‘Ritz’ (‘no not Biarritz’). ‘Resign resign resign,’ screams the last line of Eliot’s ‘Difficulties ...”