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“... especially technical words, regardless of the language. Chaucer, taking over as clerk of the king’s works, was given an inventory of dead stock at the Tower of London that included ‘i ramme cum toto apparatu excepta i drawying corda que frangitur et devastatur, i fryingpanne, i lathe pro officio carpentarii’: a battering-ram with a winding-cord too ...”

“... is, without puffing a sail loose. An introduction is an introduction, not a nomination. ‘This is Helen Hoho, she teaches at Heehaw,’ is quite enough. Not: ‘This is Helen Hoho, and despite what you have heard, she isn’t bad in bed, is rather good with pilaff, and can darn cotton socks like crazy.’ Indiscreet praise ...”

“... and most significantly, her late long work, Helen in Egypt (1961) – a psychomachia and revisionary epic taking up Stesichoros’ poem from the sixth century BCe, in which a blameless Helen goes not with Paris to Troy but to Egypt to wait out the war. Part of H.D.’s ...”

“... a heroic journey out of a return to a middle-aged wife. But women are not incidental to the Iliad. Helen’s abduction has caused the war, and the tussle over Chryseis and Briseis kickstarts the poem’s plot. It is Thetis, Achilles’ mother, who coaxes Zeus to punish the Greeks on her son’s behalf, driving the action of two-thirds of the poem. Aphrodite ...”

“... Perplexing questions hung in the still air. Some hung there year after year: who killed the nurse Helen Smith? Some were of immediate import: where has the main post office gone this week? Some were insoluble, questions almost too puzzling to pose: where, oh where, is Idi Amin? The Uganda dictator, driven out by Tanzanian troops in 1979, had been offered ...”

“... immediately successive alliterating words: ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon.’ We’re also drawn into Ford’s poems by his conviction that his experience is no different from ours: ‘Our errands merely seem/ average and natural: every second is underwritten/by an invisible ...”

“... Greek leader Agamemnon had uttered very similar words when his brother Menelaus (for whose wife, Helen, the whole war is fought) was wounded: A day will come when sacred Ilion will perish, with Priam, lord of the fine ash spear, and Priam’s people; And Zeus, high-throned son of Kronos, the sky dweller, will, in fury at such deceit, shake his black-cloud ...”

“... at that level in 2018-19 (the long-term average was about 3.3 per cent). The current chair, Helen Pitcher, decided to make a virtue of this, claiming that sending cases back to the Court of Appeal was ‘not the be-all and end-all’. In 2019 the All Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice established a commission to investigate the ...”

“... Brendan King​ starts with a difficulty: Beryl Bainbridge’s writing. It makes everyone else’s prose look flabby. But he also has an advantage: his particular knowledge of her life. King worked with Bainbridge for more than twenty years. He looked after her admin and edited her last novel for publication after her death ...”

“... between Cubism and the Theory of Relativity. We know a great deal about Caravaggio’s Rome. Helen Langdon’s biography is especially rich in new research and she is as informative on the intellectual and cultural interests of Cardinal del Monte as on the notions of ‘honour’ that provoked thuggish street brawls; she explains how the households of ...”

“... the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the ...”

“... At the treason trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of ...”

“... in this novel. The expatriate community in Rangoon decide to rename an island after the English king, in order to honour the royal birthday. An elaborate expedition sets sail. Once disembarked on the wild island, this patriotic picnic party starts to go badly awry. An undisciplined massacre of turtles, emerging from the sea to lay, is a dismaying omen. Much ...”

“... best-edited of novels. On page ten the lovers are discovered on a June afternoon: ‘the bed is king-sized, with a white padded headboard and matching white bedside cupboards.’ On page 14 it is the same afternoon, the bed is still king-size and the lovers are still in it: but the bedside tables are now mahogany and ...”

“... are bombarded not with useful news but with junk about how the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques (King Fahd) has received a message from the President of Djibouti. Realism is at a premium, and three months after the arrival of US troops King Fahd still talks about ‘Arab and friendly forces’ as if most of the soldiers ...”