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“... centuries.The first book printed in England to carry a date (though it probably wasn’t the first English printed book) was The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published by William Caxton in 1477, which grouped a miscellany of moral sayings under authorial headings. Many of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ...”

“... According to Hannibal Hamlin, in Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (2004), English versions and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and significant allusions in poems, plays and literary prose by English men and women of varied social and intellectual backgrounds, accommodating biblical texts to their personal agendas, whether religious, political or aesthetic ...”

“... But while in Germany the age of Classicism was succeeded by the age of learned historicism, the English were on the whole content to study Classical civilisation in outline, and shrank from the labour of learned and intensive study. Had Thomas Arnold not been cut off in his forties, things might have been different. Arnold belonged to a group of scholars ...”

“... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...”

“... seen by the abandoned partner as giving them the right to remarry. But in spite of the mobility of English rural society from the Middle Ages on, life was not easy for the fugitive (any more than it was in France for the ‘exile’ – the malefactor sentenced to be banished). In this type of marriage, the definition of illegitimacy lacked rigour: there was ...”

“... for the requisite extractions) on her 21st birthday, or the occasion of her first marriage. As Richard Barnett points out in his excellent text for The Smile Stealers, it wasn’t uncommon up until the late 1930s for young women to receive just such a benison – the reification, if you like, of the great relief to be obtained once those nerve-infested ...”

“... Lionel Trilling and Fred Dupee, continuing at Clare College, Cambridge, where he got a First in English and an invitation from F. R. Leavis, a figure he came to admire more even than he admired Trilling, to write for Scrutiny. Not long after that and still in his early twenties, he began appearing in Partisan Review and Commentary, and soon enough in the ...”

“... Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Now, in 1996, this same Hershel Parker, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, has constructed an alternative version meant to approximate the originally completed novel Melville delivered to Harpers. In the absence of any manuscript copies, it is impossible to determine exactly what or how much was ...”

“... of text and almost another hundred pages of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian. In the 1710s the appearance of Bentley’s Horace and Newton’s Principia on CUP’s list gave it ...”

“... with them, and what, exhausted, exhilarated or astonished, they carry away. Lovers on the Nile is Richard Hall’s account of Samuel Baker’s voyage in search of the Mountains of the Moon with his young companion Florence. It is not so much a biography as the story of a seven-year travelling honeymoon. In fact, the book flows at an easy pace, but only once ...”

“... and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near Wakefield. In 1700 he became Master of Trinity, and despite continual battles with the fellows survived until the age of 80. Bentley was an outstanding textual critic. His famous edition of ...”

“... for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information. Richard Tull, a novelist, hears birds singing in his garden, and thinks, mournfully: ‘say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through ...”

“... it) is congenitally resistant to study.’ Thus John Deathridge, the leading Wagner scholar of the English-speaking world, at the beginning of his chapter on Wagner research in the Wagner Handbook. If so learned and au courant a scholar as Deathridge is daunted by trying to make sense of Wagner research and interpretation, what about the rest of us? For not ...”

“... or impossible to articulate at all. Within the compass of a single lifetime, 16th-century English people had been required to reform their official beliefs no fewer than five times; and the result was that for many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries faith itself seems to have become a shifting and uncertain thing, whose fractures and contradictions ...”

“... famous because it seemed to recount her adventures with Liszt. Few people now have heard of it. As Richard Bolster and Stock-Morton both observe, her novels are as mediocre as most 19th-century romans à clé. According to Stock-Morton, a modern Marie d’Agoult would probably have visited a psychotherapist instead of writing fiction. No one should regret the ...”