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“... woods of oak and birch, and water meadows. The floors are oak. A handful of rooms are heated by wood-burning stoves, and it’s sparsely furnished. There aren’t many distractions: no internet, television, computers, phones, radio, electricity. It’s the early 19th century, after all. There’s nobody to talk to. Of course there are hundreds of people ...”

“... heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. From childhood onwards, Eliot was fascinated not just by names in general, but by his own. Murder in the Cathedral, the 1935 play which, throughout the period covered by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income ...”

“... University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, duly published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. In a year that would have seemed laborious even to a writer not suffering from marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment ...”

“... painting in four or five of those submitted was rejected. In 1873, however, during the reign of Charles Blanc, more than half did not make it to the wall. Blanc, a critic and art theorist, showed that scandal-fearing politicians were much less dangerous than those, like Blanc, who took schemes for the improvement of art and morals seriously. The Salon ...”

“... to the Burgh Court Hall with their babes in arms. The municipal buildings. Everything smelled of wood waxing. A nervous succession of tenants would rise before the Baillie. ‘Why do you not pay your rent?’ ‘My man’s at the Front. No money. The wean’s sick. A don’t have it.’ ‘Three weeks to pay, or eject.’ Sometimes: ‘Pay by Wednesday, or ...”

“... memoir-writing by the upper classes, remains first-rate. For much of the volume we are in a remote wood-chopping world, a species of Arcadia – though a far from innocent one – in which earth-shaking events do not intrude. Leacock, it emerges, first became a humorous lecturer to raise funds for the Belgians in 1914, but, apart from that, World War One (in ...”

“... writing. As he would have wished, she puts more of an emphasis on the historical novels – Witch Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine ...”

“... or much maligned royal statesman?’ Brooke’s near hagiography has a foreword by Prince Charles, whom he befriended in the Royal Archives at Windsor: ‘We both agreed that George III had been unfairly maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an ...”

“... with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had ...”

“... Gauguin as a ‘defender of the savages’. At a subsequent auction, he bought several canvases, wood carvings, some notebooks and Gauguin’s palette, 24 lots in all for 190 francs, or a little less than a month’s pay. This wasn’t a bit of speculative connoisseurship: at the time he seems to have had little interest in the work as such; rather, he was ...”

“... London, during the Second World War, she was evacuated to her grandparents’ in Chorley Wood, ‘a safe place for a Jewish child in 1940s Europe’. After the war, her father never came back. The divorce was ‘loud’. Neither parent wanted Barbara and her younger sister, Ruth, so they were made wards of court. Her father later took his own ...”

“... upon a time it was winter & snowed down from the sky and a queen sat at a window of ebony wood & sewed.’ The equivalent in the first printed version is: ‘Once upon a time it was the middle of winter and the snowflakes fell like feathers from the sky. A beautiful queen sat and sewed at a window that had a frame made of black ebony.’Myths rapidly ...”

“... Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by ...”

“... of the Hudson. In New York, Oppen met Louis Zukofsky, who had already been published by Pound, and Charles Reznikoff, an attorney at work on a law encyclopedia. The three poets, grown uneasy with Imagism and keen to distinguish themselves, conceived a publishing venture which was very much in the Oppens’ mind when they took off for Europe in 1929. They ...”

“... in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles-at-home photo from 1963; a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles photo at Shea Stadium from 1965; a hip young mixadelic band citing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as ...”