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“... had a pronounced streak of family piety. Commenting on The Man Within, his rich uncle ‘Eppy’ (Edward) told him: ‘It could only have been written by a Greene.’ In his memoir, Greene stages his puzzlement at this remark: ‘I thought of my parents, I thought of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two ...”

“... and an important feature of his view of life; but he was seriously ‘unsettled’, as Edward Mendelson says, and had acquired ‘a profound new sense of menace and dread’.He had become professor of poetry at Oxford in 1956, although he was still mainly living in New York, and in 1958 he had shifted his summer residence from Ischia to a small ...”

“... her one in token of our union.’ Their relationship ‘would be as good as a marriage’, Ann had said. ‘Yes,’ said Anne, ‘quite as good or better.’ Earlier she had broached the subject with her aunt. ‘My aunt seemed very well pleased at my choice and prospects. I said she had ...”

“... not Miller who turned up but Kallman. Isherwood was in the next room when Auden came through and said: ‘It’s the wrong blond.’ The rest is history. Or literature. Or the history of literature. Or maybe just gossip. And on that score anathema to Auden himself, who, wanting no biography, would have been appalled to read this blow-by-blow-account of his ...”

“... which were at their peak last summer, when the Guardian and others first got their hands on Edward Snowden’s documents – was that we’re all being watched all the time. Anything we do online, and any phone call we make, is potentially being analysed by the NSA and its friends. But, as Luke Harding discloses in his book on the Snowden affair, the ...”

“... that some of them spoke no English. That was probably hardly true even then, and the government of Edward VI had no hesitation in massacring them for their obduracy. Early translations into major modern European languages followed, for diplomatic purposes, to demonstrate to potential Roman Catholic royal brides or their anxious advisers that the English ...”

“... simple loyalty to the landowner. Russell’s life was not remarkable, on the surface. Evelyn Waugh said he was ‘exquisitely entertaining’, but this is ambiguous: he may have meant that Russell was a figure of fun, like William Boot. When Russell died in 1947 he was described in the Times as ‘that most endearing of Somerset farmers’ – the best tribute ...”

“... Just the place for a snark, the Bellman said. And with equal assurance, political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal ...”

“... actually read it, because they are often uncertain about its format, having probably read only Edward Garnett’s dim-witted abridgement. Dover’s proper two-volume edition in paperback is a faithful (since facsimile) reproduction of the definitive 1936 version of Doughty, complete with Lawrence’s Introduction and Doughty’s three prefaces, the ...”

“... which in the early 1850s fired the imaginations of the Oxford undergraduates William Morris and Edward Burne Jones. But De Morgan was enrolled at University College, where there was no scope for picturesque medievalism. The spirit of place did not haunt Gower Street. Having failed to get a degree, De Morgan decided to become a painter. He made friends among ...”

“... suggested that Maugham script a film about James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. ‘He said no; there was no love interest in the first Rajah’s life.’ Sylvia Brooke, the wife of the third and last member of the Brooke dynasty, Rajah Vyner, pitched the idea of a film about the first Rajah to Warner Brothers, who summoned her to Hollywood to talk ...”

“... the fresco, was whitewashed in 1820, but the tale of the luckless swine has been preserved in Edward Payson Evans’s history of the criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals, first published in 1906 and now reissued. According to Evans, such trials were commonplace, forming part of the fabric of medieval European justice. Pigs accounted for ...”

“... When Tom Hopkinson was nine years old his father called the family together. He had decided, he said, to become a clergyman. Later he told his son that he had been persuaded to take this long-contemplated step by hearing a sermon ‘so distracted and confused that he had realised the clergyman delivering it must be overwhelmed with the burden of his work ...”

“... game puffing itself up like an elephant seal to fight for its colonies? Gore Vidal once said that England should become one of the ‘lands’ and understand its geographical and political place in the world: Iceland, Newfoundland, Greenland, England. If that’s too hard to bear, we could at least look to Scandinavia (does the recent Saturday-night ...”

“... night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said nothing.’ His admirers included some of the nation’s greatest men: in 1860, thanking a friend for a gift of Halleck’s poems, Abraham Lincoln wrote: ‘Many a month has passed since I have met with anything more admirable than his beautiful ...”