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“... plinths in a psychosexual romance of heavy cloaks, gas masks, boots and belts. I think of Walter Owen’s strange First World War fantasy, The Cross of Carl (1931), in which underground trains shunt still conscious corpses from the trenches to industrial units, where they will be rendered into meat. Silver rails out of the capital double as telegraph ...”

“... own mayor in 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby joining a group of major cities led by black politicians. A number of these cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Newark – would be ravaged by deindustrialisation, but at the time they were laboratories for black political ...”

“... of the art world, and perhaps to see eggs chucked at the officials who gave prizes to Gilbert and George and at the critics who acclaimed Julian Schnabel, begin to wonder whether we might be mistaken for part of the congregation – or is it a rally? – and find ourselves having to kneel, or sing the National Anthem. The subject of art schools is ...”

“... has traditionally been mocked (even by critics now as prehistoric-looking themselves as Walter Allen) as the epitome of middlebrow philistinism – on a par with the Janeite who reads Austen every year to relish her ‘wit’. This, however, is the company Wall prefers. Wall takes it for granted that Trollope must be swallowed as the boa takes the ...”

“... camera discredited their expression of piety otherwise displayed. (Frame Analysis) Sharper than George V, he spots a button undone: Young psychiatrists in state mental hospitals who are sympathetic to the plight of the patients sometimes express distance from their administrative medical role by affecting shirts open at the collar, much as do socialists in ...”

“... and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes – ‘George Etherton’, Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a dear boy’ to them. At the ...”

“... and a morality that can be formulated and talked about, not just sealed in the amber of Walter Pater’s cadences. His own talk about it, particularly when he shows it in splendid action in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is as good as Pound’s talk, and comes, as Pound’s does, from taking seriously what is being talked about by Guinicelli and Cavalcanti ...”

“... for at one level they issued from, and conferred, an experience of the good things of life. George III is credited with the accurate prediction that ‘he was a very clever fellow, but that he would never be a bishop.’ Smith was bored by the country, but was exiled for most of his career to rural livings – at Foston in Yorkshire and Combe Florey in ...”

“... the hubris of planners. Two years later, he helped to organise the colloquium in Paris inspired by Walter Lippmann’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, which had used Austrian ideas to attack Roosevelt’s New Deal, while also urging liberals to move past ‘the fallacy of laissez-faire’ and build a positive legal-political agenda. The German ...”

“... are a tantalisingly small and pure uchronia, and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh. A Life of Bunting, then, was for many years the most obviously ‘missing’ book I could think of. For all the reasons – the ticked boxes – above; for a rather beautiful relation between the life as old as the century (1900-85) and the ...”

“... Earl of Somerset, was being supplanted as James I’s latest most beloved delegate on earth by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. For a playwright working under such regimes, picturing ideal monarchs might be a far safer option than depicting the ways in which the affairs of state were really being conducted. This is certainly suggested by the experience ...”

“... Shandy Hall inhabit a world of incompetently linked ideas – Toby’s obsession with war games, Walter’s doomed theories – in sporadic collision with unco-operative physical facts. Porter rightly says that the book keeps leading us back to ‘a body which never lets the mind forget its presence’. In general he sees the body and natural sentiment as ...”

“... with the extraordinary Goncourt brothers, with Turgenev and Maupassant. The correspondence with George Sand is particularly engaging. More than anyone else, Sand challenged Flaubert’s advocacy of impersonality, astutely suggesting that it was his own personal issue more than anything else. She pointed out how good and generous he was to his friends, which ...”

“... the bank was a very profitable business, though it sometimes placed them in awkward positions: George Washington, for example, was a stockholder when the bank was financing the war to put down his rebellion. For the state, having easy access to a huge pool of private capital allowed it to outspend and ultimately defeat France, even though it was larger and ...”

“... that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included ...”