“... world.’ An admirer of Eliot, Lowell and the Classical tradition, as well as a translator from Duncan Ban Macintyre and the great heritage of Gaelic verse, Crichton Smith was a superb mediator between the various cultures native to his imagination, an imagination often haunted by loss. In review, however, his career seems crammed with undeniable ...”

“... managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the ...”

“... in a way, for the picture-postcard commentary he has always been asked to provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for ...”

“... The aim of Cooper’s evil Indians is, fortunately, rarely as deadly: when one of his heroes, Duncan Heyward, comes under attack from a band of whooping Hurons, who pour fire at him until his clothes have been ‘repeatedly cut’ by their bullets, he escapes with only a slight wound in his arm. Cooper, who wrote at great speed, seems to have been almost ...”

“... that ‘the etching on page 187 does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.’ Technically the most impressive thing in the book is a 90-page letter from Bella describing her European tour and brutal political education, with the accelerating development of her mind signalled by a transition from sing-song ...”

“... observation had just done so, or perhaps both. In the first piece in the first volume of Duncan Wu’s edition of New Writings, a letter to the Monthly Magazine in 1809, Hazlitt acknowledges the value of ‘physical analogy’ and praises thinkers who can find ways of ‘incorporating the abstract with the concrete’, yet at the same time he insists ...”

“... son pondering the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution and his friendship with Isadora Duncan – and his own adolescent attitude to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of ...”

“... general agreement about the infection idea. Shakespeare’s most recent biographer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, who incidentally thinks the young friend was William Herbert, not Southampton, has a good learned note in her edition about contemporary accounts of men getting burned by the female genitalia – ‘thus was his paradice turned into his purgatory ...”

“... in terror to conceal their accent.At first, the rising had seemed almost trivial. In August 1745, Duncan Forbes, Scotland’s senior law lord, reckoned that Prince Charles – ‘this young gentleman’ who had reportedly landed in the Hebrides – had no ‘apparatus for his reception, even amongst the few highlanders who are suspected to be in his ...”

“... to repel the imagination.† ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ Duncan declares in Macbeth; but we seem to believe that a ‘true likeness’ might somehow give us an insight into genius that we otherwise lack; and the longing to know what Shakespeare ‘really’ looked like shows no sign of abating. As with the face, so ...”

“... blond-rinsed girls, who go through a mixed routine, from rough-hewn disco-dancing to some Isadora Duncan stuff. They are well-drilled, energetic, and a long way from tickling the erotic; there is also something not quite right about them. Then, abruptly, one girl goes up on her left foot and slowly raises her, right leg out sideways. When it reaches nine ...”

“... especially Scottish. That means the Ossian cult, the gorgeously sentimental myth-paintings of John Duncan, the swooping Iron Age interlace on Archibald Knox’s silverware for Liberty. Cautiously but understandably, the curators avoid neo-Celtic politics. Within the British archipelago, imagined Celtic pasts reinforce mild, left-of-centre versions of ...”

“... August, the Labour Party’s spokesman on home affairs, John Fraser, wrote to the home secretary, Robert Carr, about the cases. The Sunday Times report on Fraser’s letter said that he had asked Carr ‘to pay special regard to the method of proof used by transport police’ and the lack of ‘independent witnesses’. According to the article, Ridgewell was ...”

“... There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye ...”

“... Letters, Robert Lovelace remarks in Clarissa, are a way of ‘writing from the heart’. A brilliant letter-writer though a terrible etymologist, Lovelace finds warrant for this belief in the word correspondence: letters (so he thinks) touch the core, the coeur, of their senders’ being, revealing their innermost thoughts and sensations, showing their essential character ...”