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“... they danced in the streets on a magical VE night, bright anti-aircraft searchlights overhead. Gerald’s boozy proposition – ‘What about a baby then, old girl?’ – fitted in with the evening’s high jinks: ‘they had to round off their victory night celebrations somehow.’ But they don’t have a fairytale marriage – Ivy and ...”

“... Surrounding them are figures more tenuously linked to Purbeck: Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, James Meade Falkner (who wrote Moonfleet), Gerald Brenan, John Stewart Collis, Fritz Schumacher, John Eliot Gardiner (son of Rolf) and via him Roger Norrington, Lord Hinchinbrooke, Jimmy Edwards, Kenneth Allsop, Tariq ...”

“... the head most excitingly takes place. I started to reflect on Larkin and pornography when reading James Booth’s highly effective and detailed study of his poems, though the subject had been put into my head by Anthony Thwaite’s selection of the poet’s letters. Booth, together with Barbara Everett, is among the few critics who have produced real ...”

“... the end of her long career, Braddon had earned a grudging respect from her contemporaries. Henry James acknowledged that her novels were ‘brilliant, lively, ingenious and destitute of a ray of sentiment’. In a letter of 1911 he told her that ‘I used to follow you ardently.’ But after her death Braddon’s reputation declined, along with the ...”

“... He asked the inevitable questions and grimaced when she told him her favourite writer was Henry James. ‘He asked me if I rewrote a lot and said you should never revise, never change anything, not even a word. He regretted all the rewriting he’d done on The Town and the City. No one could make him do that again.’ Kerouac soon put Glassman in a ...”

“... religious experience which drew him to the ‘non-human’ and which led, in Women in Love, to Gerald Crich’s hunger for ‘snow-abstract annihilation’ and Rupert Birkin’s disappointment with the ‘merely human’. But we must also acknowledge that he had always been fascinated by the ‘non-human’ or the ‘physic’ in men and women. The letter ...”

“... system devised for the analysis of Russian folk-tales can be adapted to the later novels of Henry James. The microscopic machinery of phonemic analysis can be blown up to the macroscopic scale and used to examine the structure of narrative. And endless fascinating variations can be discovered in practically anything by applying what the French (but nobody ...”

“... and expect you to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no ...”

“... The Magnificent Ambersons; my perfect exit from this world – at 19 one plans such things – was Gerald’s long walk into the Alpine blizzard towards the close of Women in Love (I had toyed with Captain Oates’s departure from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition, but Gerald’s taciturn self-erasure seemed more ...”

“... She thought my father would be pleased if he knew and so would both my uncles.’ In the 1180s, Gerald of Wales described the energetic same-sex marriage practised by the Irish: First they exchange covenants of co-fatherhood (compaternitas, also ‘comradeship’). Then they take it in turns to carry each other around the church three times. Next, they go ...”

“... leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal ...”

“... in the fact that the magazine which published some of the leading graphic satirists of the age (Gerald Scarfe’s senilely brooding Churchill must be one of the finest covers of the last twenty years) has always been laid out in so amateurish and Cow-gum a fashion that it makes Isis look like Harper’s Queen. Yet the funny side of Private Eye is not that ...”

“... But the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made her popular, and that he kept her work continually in ...”

“... the last, which is followed by a chapter-length Postlude. Letters to Craft from Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard are newly included. Letters (also to Craft) from Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, Glenn Gould and other musical luminaries are also published for the first time; and most of the illustrations are new. Gone are the itineraries that laboriously ...”

“... a hideous woolly jumper displaying the flags of the EEC nations. Back in the mid-1970s the tycoon James Goldsmith, the future founder of the anti-European Referendum Party, was a prominent supporter of the Common Market. The position of the press also changed. In the earlier campaign the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express enthusiastically made the case ...”