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“... the hands and clothes – are more distinctly Lavaterian in inspiration. (Barbara Hardy and John Carey have illuminatingly anatomised the significance of clothes as an index of character in Dickens and Thackeray, without invoking physiognomy.) But the truth is that after the effective build-up in the background chapters which comprise half of his ...”

“... history repressed is more interesting than history expressed, as in the poetry of Southey, Scott, even Shelley. Besides, this historical foraging into the bad conscience of Wordsworth the ex-radical challenges the portrait of Wordsworth as counter-revolutionary which began to take shape around 1950, to be gradually developed by some of the leading ...”

“... back merely to keep her company. Her biggest Hollywood affair post-Sinatra was with George C. Scott, the most ghastly of all her lovers. Gardner had no private life. Her failed marriage to Sinatra inspired In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, one of the great heartbreak records. Nelson Riddle said that Sinatra’s voice at this period was ‘like a ...”

“... not unprecedented: what really distinguished Gray’s epic postmodernism from the work of, say, John Fowles or Thomas Pynchon was the absolute lucidity of his approach. Lanark was – and remains – intensely readable, combining the narrative hooks of science fiction with the solid satisfactions of the Victorian novel: read the first chapter of Lanark, in ...”

“... of oppression, are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old Story (1822), neatly describing the emotional dynamic by which narratives about Mary Queen of Scots, such as this historical romance itself, could be used to serve the ...”

“... form and function, the K2, built out of cast iron to a neoclassical design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and painted a glossy Post Office red all over, came into service in 1927. It was as much emblem as shelter: ventilation came from holes pierced through the top fascia in the shape of a crown. The smaller and more durable K6, also designed by ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... the Heseltine campaign for leader in 1990 – Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that ...”

“... and finally to expand that notion of interaction into the genres of autobiographies.’ In 1993, John Sturrock could say in The Language of Autobiography: ‘there has never yet been an autobiography addressed to a readership of literary theorists.’ Now it looks as if that time is upon us. The general reader, it seems, is left out of the loop, save as ...”

“... conversion to co-operatives of conventional enterprises – the kinds of conversion introduced by John Lewis into his stores in 1929 and into Scott Bader in 1951 – and in the establishment of completely new co-operatives, a good deal more is possible than might be imagined. Although those who first have the idea and first ...”

“... the seconds left before touch-down, I resolved that I must exorcise my demon and fly again.Peter Scott started gliding the same year as me, and in Cambridge we used to say that the experience was reflected in the change that came over his wild-life paintings, the cardboard clouds of yesterday suddenly growing into beautiful living masses of cumulus. By 1963 ...”

“... claims into question.The modern​ appropriation of Phoenicia began in 16th-century Kent with John Foche, who was said to have ‘discovered’ that the first foreign visitors to Britain were the Phoenicians. Although Foche couldn’t know it, there is today one piece of evidence for a Phoenician presence on the British Isles, a tile excavated at Holt in ...”

“... Holyhead. The Company failed soon enough and Jones returned to writing, publishing two sub-Walter Scott epic poems, Corayda and Lord Lindsay, and most ambitiously, My Life, a verse novel cum autobiography which Taylor sees as having affinities with Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. The main character is Jones’s idealised version of himself as the aristocrat ...”

“... with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast in their constituencies, 44 (including Tony Blair and John Prescott) were elected with over 70 per cent, and two with over 80 per cent. By contrast, only 14 Conservatives won more than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The most successful Conservative, John Major in ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”