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“... of mother-son relationships in European and African fiction. Where for a writer such as D.H. Lawrence the maternal relationship is destructive and needs to be fought against, in African fiction, Gordimer claimed, the mother’s kiss, ‘rather like a loving smack on the behind’, is a blessing that releases the son into the world. Be that as it may, My ...”

“... an indigenous British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of ...”

“... edition (admittedly her letters amount only to a more manageable four thousand) and so did Lawrence, but Forster, fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight ...”

“... is the Palladian Chapel which Fanny Burney described as ‘a Pantheon in miniature’. Designed by John Tasker for Thomas Weld and made by Italian craftsmen in 1792, this is widely known as the first free-standing Catholic church to be built in England after the Reformation. Meanwhile Saint Andrews, the old village church from which Weld bones were removed to ...”

“... all round about this. In terms of anxiety-inducing literary influences, he had his effect on D.H. Lawrence, but not in ways that have to do with a sense of humour. His relationship to sexual emancipation in general is far more intriguing, because it took hold in the international sphere, the world of German sexology, Leo Tolstoy and P.D. Ouspenski. It is very ...”

“... handful of the better international medals – those bearing the names of Livingstone, Burton and Lawrence. Thesiger was ‘the first British child born in Abyssinia’, where his father, the British minister, had been escorted to the legation by a tyrant none the less dangerous for having been castrated as a boy. Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of India and ...”

“... not intent on dismantling a philistine industrialism, but on adding a spot of imagination to it. John Stuart Mill did not reject Benthamism; he simply mixed it with a creative dash of Coleridge. The more aggressive choice for art was to beat science at its own game – to insist that it was itself a form of cognition, but one far superior to the reflections ...”

“... or prevent his backing some kind of arrangement with the Arabs. He was very close to T.E. Lawrence, whose death in 1935 was a devastating blow; and in 1939 he entered into intrigues with Kim Philby’s father, an adviser to the Saudi king. During the Second World War – at the start of which he procured a lethal dose of veronal in case of a Nazi ...”

“... In​ 2019, all four artists nominated for the Turner Prize – Helen Cammock, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – shared the award, not at the instigation of the judges but at the request of the artists themselves, who asked to be considered as a collective rather than individual entrants, ‘in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity ...”

“... Encyclopédie, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776), and the more specialised works studied by Lawrence Lipking in his important book, The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England – Charles Burney’s History of Music, for example, Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art and Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets. The Oxford History of English Literature ...”

“... like Vanity Fair and Esquire regularly published modernist writers like Cocteau, Hemingway, Lawrence, Dos Passos and Djuna Barnes. (The New Yorker, founded in 1925, was considerably less daring: the fiction editor, Katharine White, rejected work by Gertrude Stein because ‘she was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn’t ...”

“... problem. Nearly twenty years ago, just before the tide of historical fashion turned against him, Lawrence Stone wrote a supremely confident short book called The Causes of the English Revolution. It argued, in up-to-date sociological jargon, more or less everything against which Russell’s writing has been a reaction. The bold innocence of Russell’s ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming ...”

“... of cancer eight months later but in the meantime some of the cells found their way to the lab of John and Margaret Gey of Johns Hopkins University. They were trying to find a method of keeping human cells dividing in a culture outside the body and had turned to cancer cells for their ability to divide essentially unchecked. These particular cells, named HeLa ...”

“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”