“... a novelist. The very title reminds us he was a Victorian, only two years younger than Lord Alfred Douglas. His most celebrated novels of English life were published in the 1930s. Then he moved to Wales, became very Cymric, historical and metaphysical; a sage, visited by disciples, he wrote of mysteries and antiquities until his death, aged 91, in 1963. After ...”

“... to the left, demanding increases in income and inheritance taxes, a shortening of the working day, federal control of farm surpluses, and currency inflation that would reduce the burdens on indebted farmers. He ripped into fake corporate concern for the people, asking a manufacturers’ association, ‘Why didn’t all you lovin’, kindly ...”

“... evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an early love, fellow-sailors), his touch in this prose is less secure than in either the kind of prose which he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that ...”

“... exile and death. Before Wilde’s self-destructive vanity and narcissistic love for Lord Alfred Douglas impelled him to prosecute the Marquis of Queensberry, his position had been that of an ironic dandy in a brutalised and hypocritical society. Wilde defined dandyism as ‘the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty’ and by this definition the ...”

“... to privilege, who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an affair with an aristocratic Tory woman and loved nothing better than to dance the night away at the Gargoyle Club, the haunt ...”

“... had been a watershed for Barker, as he recalled: ‘my childhood came to an end on that day in nineteen hundred and heaven knows what when I spent my lunch money on a poem which seemed to me so great that for two or three days afterwards my own poems disappointed me.’ Eliot, for his part, seemed to respond readily to the strains of an antique ...”

“... quality in Harrison’s rhetoric? Should we explain it in terms of the prevailing discourse of the day, which she was obliged to adopt in order to be heard at all, or should we agree with Tina Passman that ‘Jane Harrison wrote like a dyke and lived like a dyke’? Beard steps carefully around the issues of desire and passion; she prefers to address the ...”

“... Vail, seems to have been less well informed. ‘In Toledo,’ she tells us, ‘we spent the whole day searching for El Greco’s painting of that city, not knowing that it was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.’ Alfred Barr, in the preface to her autobiography, claims that she had ‘loved and studied Italian Renaissance painting, particularly that of ...”

“... market’ or ‘the nation’ can be unwieldy, and often carry scholars some distance from the day to day concerns of those who actually toil in the literary field. And ‘genre’ – a staple of literary analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in ...”

“... resources with them. In American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described five ‘distinct dimensions’ by which segregation might be measured: unevenness, which is the degree to which African Americans are over-represented in specific areas; exposure, the level of contact, or lack of ...”

“... After a bumpy start at Deerfield (‘I wish I was home,’ he wrote in his diary after his fourth day), he found his way to the school’s art studio and settled right in. The academic work initially overwhelmed him, and he detested the daily and compulsory sports practices. Rumours began circulating that he was homosexual and he was persecuted for it. The ...”

“... territorial waters. That was how the General Belgrano came to be destroyed later the same day despite the fact that London knew it had been heading toward home waters since dawn (11 hours earlier). The attack, which took 368 Argentine lives, proved to be the pivotal event of the war: until that time no Briton had been killed. Furthermore, efforts were ...”

“... temple at Ephesus.’ The brothel scenes were heavily pruned: this was a Pericles, in the words of Douglas Jerrold in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, ‘disinfected of its impurities in a manner that would win the praise of the most fastidious member of the most moral Board of Health that ever held its sittings within the camphored precincts of Exeter ...”

“... became a ‘celebrity’: a boutique director as fervently admired by Hollywood royalty – Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin – as he was in the European salons and cine-clubs. October (1928), which begins with the abdication of Nicolas II and concludes with the storming of the Winter Palace, followed; and then The General Line ...”

“... you’ve opted in. What has Schuyler made of his life? He’s made this.In his absorbing Life, A Day like Any Other, Nathan Kernan begins by noting that this isn’t a critical biography, before adding that, after the details have been absorbed, he would like the reader to remember the caveat Schuyler offers in ‘Hymn to Life’ about the taxonomy of his ...”