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“... match between subject and author make the series distinctive. The ‘concept’, as its editor James Atlas explained to me a few years ago, is to produce books that airline passengers can read on a flight from New York to San Francisco and finish before they reach the Golden Gate. Given the entertainment options available at 35,000 feet this is not an ...”

“... and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete. Henry James was snooty about Hardy, but I wonder how James would have done, if given as a kind of literary test a cow’s udder to describe? Admirably, no doubt, with his usual lyrical paradox of oddly precise euphemism, but ...”

“... post-Smartian Seatonian to have arrested his attention previously was The Ascension (1780) by one James Atkins, which he defiantly published after failing to win the prize – ‘for several Reasons’, as one of the judges had grimly told him, which no doubt included his whimsical theology and misguided decision to write in seven-syllable blank ...”

“... for a five-dollar bill.’ Having counted out the pennies, and taken along an anthology of William James for company, Baker was forced to wait at the counter as the manager counted out every penny, ‘while dozens of well-off, exhausted East Siders curled their lips at my somewhat pathetic miserliness’: I reeled to the violently yellow ...”

“... as much as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all ...”

“... Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The singularity of their careers has earned them a place ...”

“... his earlier given name, Ras Tafari, offensive, and did not consider himself to be Black. Meanwhile Marcus Garvey, who accepted Haile Selassie’s own account of his lineage as a descendant of Solomon and so considered him to be Jewish, discounted him as an ally in the struggle for Black liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a ...”

“... twice. But he was sufficiently streetwise in the ways of the Court to make it, eventually, with James I, and in the ways of the street to write Bartholomew Fair (a chapter on this play, along with The Alchemist, and another on Measure for Measure, is the prize which awaits us inside all the wrappings, at the end of this pass-the-parcel of a book). Like the ...”

“... Elizabeth and admiration for Gloriana have never before had anything like the resource provided by Marcus, Mueller and Rose in their Elizabeth I: Collected Works, which consists of all the full-length speeches, prayers and poems, as preserved in reasonably reliable texts, and a generous selection of her letters. The letters take us from the most important she ...”

“... to Nead: ‘The fogs of the 1950s were different … from the fogs of Conan Doyle and Henry James. They drew on the accumulated meanings of the Victorian fogs, but they were also distinctively modern.’ This is, at best, questionable, quasi-anthropomorphic, ascribing to fogs memory and mimetic capacities. Nead goes on to grant meaning to other ...”

“... catch a glimpse, flickering in and out of focus, of the elusive face of a historical human being. Marcus Junius Brutus was born sometime between 85 and 78 bc, into a family that traced its ancestry back to the legendary Lucius Junius Brutus who had supposedly expelled the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, in 510 bc, and served as one of the first ...”

“... complacent Dr Ragin in ‘Ward 6’, who lectures his abused patients at the local asylum about Marcus Aurelius and the importance of stoicism, and in the fatuous priest in ‘In the Ravine’ who, at dinner, comforts a woman who has lost her baby while pointing at her with ‘a fork with a pickled mushroom on the end of it’. Yet the son did not abandon ...”

“... dispel our misgivings. She begins in autumn 192 AD, when the emperor Commodus, megalomaniac son of Marcus Aurelius, is beginning seriously to lose it. He has subjected the people and senate of Rome to two weeks of compulsory entertainment, mostly involving the slaughter of a great number of animals in the Colosseum. At one point in this Blutfest, we are told ...”

“... a photo of it is included in the exhibition, taken at the insistence of Fenton’s chief assistant Marcus Sparling, ‘as there was a possibility of a stop being put … to the further travels of both the vehicle and its driver’. It is a heroic image, in its way: Sparling, in the driver’s seat, seems half-proud of the absurdity of his situation. The van ...”

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”