“... it’s a variation of flavour rather than a difference between species. Guy Davenport, one of the masters of essay form, wrote two sparkling pieces a year apart on table manners, one for the Hudson Review in 1979, the other for Antaeus in 1980. Shockingly, there is no overlap between them, though cannibalising your own material is generally regarded as ...”

“... three’ of the Reinagle sisters in 1807 and noted their unsentimental approach to copying the Old Masters. ‘They work very quick, & said, “Picture painted one day; sold the next; money spent the third.”’) Training sometimes began early. Helena Beatson, Read’s niece and pupil, presented her first narrative scenes at the age of eight at the 1771 ...”

“... the basic initiation rite, were developed, Stevenson argues, in Scotland. His hero is William Schaw, master of works to James VI and the member of a feverishly intellectual court. In 1598 and 1599 Schaw issued two sets of statutes which established a system of Lodges for all Scotland. Stevenson contends that Schaw was influenced by Renaissance ...”

“... role in the hard struggles of the future. But Americans, busy forging a nation from the white masters of a slave society, could afford to ignore him. They had the advantage of a constantly expanding frontier at home during the 19th century, by the end of which they had become commercially and militarily powerful, ready and keen to savour ...”

“... down the stairs into the charming toy brightness of the German room to the Brueghels and the Masters of Tired Eyes and Silver Windows. The young woman of Rembrandt is splendid.’ In his story ‘Ding-Dong’, he described the face of the pedlar woman: ‘Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square ...”

“... Arkansas and, of course, in the Shenandoah Valley, which Neely uses as one of his case studies. William Hyndman, an officer of a Pennsylvania regiment who had been kindly disposed towards the local population, ended up calling Mosby’s cavalry raiders whom civilians there protected ‘fetid decomposed humanity . . . the very scum of the foul wave of ...”

“... Bishop had many devoted friends at Harvard (as Millier notes), ranging from Octavio Paz to William Alfred and Robert Fitzgerald, and in her writing courses found students whom she admired and liked, both male and female. She also found a new person to love, Alice Methfessel, the administrative assistant at Kirkland House (the student residence where ...”

“... to put it another way, is about as far from ‘About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters’ as poetry can get, though the poem’s subject is roughly the same as Auden’s. And the tone is only achievable if one writes out the Altichiero – the knightly and metaphysical – in one’s makeup. Sometimes the best use of a passion for a painter ...”

“... five days into two separate congresses, because it proved impossible to bridge the divide between masters and journeymen.Liberals​ revered parliaments and looked with disgust on the clubs and assemblies of the radicals which seemed to them to parody the sublime procedural culture of properly elected and constituted chambers. Even more alarming, from the ...”

“... Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, was a judge with the Anglo-Egyptian Service, a vital arm of the British Protectorate running the country from the wings. There were many prints of Egypt in our Zamalek flat – picturesque views of the ruins and the pyramids and Old ...”

“... Rochester) one of the three considerable satirists of the Restoration period, one of the earliest masters of ‘poetical imitation’ in its great English Augustan phase, and in this and other ways a model for Dryden, Swift, Pope and Johnson. He is remembered in the textbooks, but he has always seemed too problematic for canonical assimilation. As a ...”

“... of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his predecessors, Ellison was entering the culturally charged ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John ...”

“... to me that I could slip them off my shoulders. The little boys were often beaten and kicked by the masters and I found this extremely frightening; one child was severely caned in front of the whole school. Lessons were an impenetrable bore. Occasionally I had severe panic attacks associated with strange fantasies – for instance, that I would soon die and be ...”

“... moles. This seems to me wrong-headed in several different ways. The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy ...”