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“... Poets often mature earlier than novelists; behind the romantic image of young poetic genius lies a clearly identifiable pattern whereby all but the greatest poets write their best work before the age of forty; the novelistic genius, on the other hand, tends to ripen with experience – to accumulate slowly. D.M. Thomas was told at the age of 25 by his ex-tutor John Bayley that he would be a late developer ...”

“... and entertain friends, a writer needs upwards of five pounds a day net. If he is prepared to die young of syphilis for the sake of an adjective he can make do on under.’ Nobody in the 1998 symposium attempts to echo Connolly’s louche self-indulgence (Sebastian Faulks attractively comes close, with his preferred target of £X + 52A + 2RT: ‘A’ stands ...”

“... theories. According to the defector Vasili Mitrokhin and the historian of intelligence Christopher Andrew, ‘by the late 1970s the KGB could fairly claim that far more Americans believed some version of its own conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, involving a right-wing plot and the US intelligence community, than still accepted the main findings ...”

“... Mozart, at six she was playing Bach in church. Nothing very remarkable happened in Eunice’s young life (though it doesn’t happen at some length in Brun-Lambert’s account of her childhood), except dogged and future-directed piano practice. She lived under an increasing burden of expectation on a talented black child, picked out by the local white ...”

“... biographers believe, as Edward Jones notes in his learned overview of archives relating to the young poet, that Milton lost sympathy with orthodox worship when an inspection of Horton parish church in 1637 required that the raised pew occupied by the Milton family should be lowered and his mother’s monument moved. Whether this is true or not (and it ...”

“... he began composing, and also sketching opera plots; his family thought they had done well for the young man in obtaining a post for him as conductor at the Magdeburg Theatre. It turned out to be a disaster: Wagner was not paid properly; and after a performance of his opera was cancelled because the cast had beaten itself bloody in a brawl before the curtain ...”

“... illustrating what would later be defined as the craven fear of being great. Kipling was too young to be contemplating a poem called ‘Retrocessional’. In 1881 the Haggards had returned to Britain, leaving their fellow settlers to buy and sell the veldt for what it would fetch, or dig vast holes in search of gold and diamonds. Haggard had then ...”

“... in the society pages. In keeping with the laws of the time, Butler was given custody of their two young children. To Kemble’s dismay, their daughter inherited her father’s outlook on slavery and strongly supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War. Before then, however, Butler’s gambling losses and financial reverses triggered by the Panic of ...”

“... Riverside (Maritime). She was carrying an elderly couple and one distracted, finger-scrolling young man. Back in August 2007 the Lower Thames and Medway Passenger Boat Company Ltd, owners and operators of the Duchess M, were fined £18,000 (with £9000 costs) for transporting more passengers than the vessel certification allowed: ninety temporary migrants ...”

“... of the facts of Keats’s life and its English context. Thirty years have passed since then, and Andrew Motion remarks, reasonably enough, in the Introduction to his new life of Keats, that ‘the lives of all important writers need to be reconsidered at regular intervals, no matter how familiar they might be’: The Keats that has come down to us is finely ...”

“... that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by Duveen himself): the conservative decorator and the conservative architect. They provided appropriate settings for Bellini and Botticelli among the tapestries and ...”

“... del secolo scorso.) Like other parties, the British CP in its heyday was disproportionately young. Like them, it lived long enough for the young it recruited at successive historical moments – and with different motivations – to grow older, marry and engender a second generation of Party members, or more likely ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... to co-operate with his biographer. Ramaphosa, an immensely private person, began as a workaholic young lawyer who, after a period of religious and student activism, worked for the National Union of Mineworkers, one of the country’s largest unions, eventually becoming its leader and thus one of the most significant figures in the internal resistance to ...”

“... Babylon as ‘people in a transparent elevator’, or when he flippantly notes that Degas’s young spartans ‘crouch and stretch purely for the benefit of the artist’. Such moments are surprisingly rare. More often one finds oneself in niggling disagreement. For instance, at the apex of Juan Gris’s collage, Breakfast (1914), he discovers ‘a packet ...”