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“... at ease among the highbrows’. Sexually too he was ambivalent, attracted to both Tom Mitford, with whom he had been at school, and Tom’s sister Diana, with whom he was for years in love. He remained bisexual for most of his life. A further episode of doubtful veracity in Another Self, according to ...”

“... Canning and Lords Eldon, Liverpool and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack ...”

“... of St Albans’s Liberal Club is a fleeting endorsement: ‘Really enjoyed the lobster curry – Tom Cruise.’Damian Boys is a former Conservative supporter turned Lib Dem. I met him at his semi-detached house in the mid-20th-century suburb of Chiswell Green. Married with two children, he’s an executive in an American tech multinational. He was working on ...”

“... of the power to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... The book which made him, Political Justice (1793), was certainly not meant to emulate Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in whipping up the political passions of the man in the street. It was written for posterity as well as for the moment, unlike most other radical retorts to Burke’s conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France ...”

“... an anomaly: a curious postscript to the 1790s radicalism inspired by the French revolution and Tom Paine, or an early harbinger of the next generation’s struggle for political reform. Despard’s cause was illuminated from a new direction by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of ...”

“... old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers. His indictments of Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton have been among the glories of the prosecuting counsel’s art in recent years. Taking the global village as his courtroom, Hitchens asks us, the jury, to stare with wonder and loathing at these singular specimens ...”

“... Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the Berkshires, epitomises the family legacy of social aspiration and financial muddle: the property was ...”

“... the combined result of every thing beautiful in imagination or in nature. And a few years later, Henry Fuseli, speaking in his capacity as professor of painting at the Royal Academy, told the students in the Academy schools that, among the ‘uninteresting subjects’ of art which they should take care to avoid, was that kind of landscape which is entirely ...”

“... Mahasweta Devi, Sivarama Karanth, Gopinath Mohanty, Vishwas Patil. (He could also have quoted Henry Fielding, who claimed in Tom Jones to ‘describe … not an individual, but a species’.)Ghosh regrets the hiving off of so-called genre writing as the category of literary fiction narrowed and calcified, but he ...”

“... were devised at a time when orthographic Darwinism was fashionable. In the 1850s, the naturalist Henry Noel Humphreys suggested that the Chinese ‘never carried the art of writing to its legitimate development in the creation of a perfect phonetic alphabet’. Bernhard Karlgren, in his Philology and Ancient China (1926), led a vanguard of alphabetic ...”

“... the board of Dunlop at the moment of its collapse in 1985 ‘read like a messenger’s speech from Henry V’. As the toffs began to retreat, they were replaced on boards by a very different species. The ‘money men’, attentive to the company’s share price rather than to its product, moved in as the City of London – once the centre of industrial ...”

“... guilty pleasure – thanks to the performance not of Sam Shepard as the general in command but of Tom Sizemore as ‘the sergeant hacking his way out of the labyrinth’. Sizemore is in fact playing a lieutenant colonel, but he might as well be a sergeant (as indeed he was in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan), because we only ever see him in the ...”

“... a fiction designed to mask a satire on what it was like to be a courtier in the later reign of Henry VIII – an experience which, for want of a better term, could be described as ‘grim’?This is an extreme version of a problem that arises with many ‘folk’ tales, and indeed with many stories which present themselves as anonymously authored, or which ...”

“... work is, he continued, try a thought-experiment. Take a truly great writer from the past – O. Henry was the example he proposed – and imagine him transported by a time machine to the present: he would be able to write a novel by Faulkner or Pynchon in a week. But imagine Faulkner or Pynchon transported to the past: they could work all their lives and ...”