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“... of Life and Letters, and chief reviewer for the Sunday Times. Among his protégés were Raymond Mortimer and Cyril Connolly. Altogether he did as much as anybody to establish or maintain the tone, the interests and the values of weekly literary journalism in the first half of this century. As to whether we ought to be grateful, opinion is divided between ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do credit to any television ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... turning on a pound of flesh.The pound of flesh brings us in sight of that ‘Tunne of Man’, Sir John Falstaff. I’ve been arguing that, throughout Shakespeare’s developing power of characterisation, the physical has a special place: from Crab the dog to Richard Crookback, then to Bottom, then to the magnificently delineated yet isolated Shylock, and ...”

“... protection of troublesome recusants under James I – and handles it frivolously. Finally, Mortimer Levine contrives to sink a self-evident truth – that women usually took the back seat in Tudor government – by refusing to admit that there were exceptions, such as Anne Boleyn. Anything but lightweight are the five essays in legal history which in a ...”

“... in and liberates its reader from what she expects, is not far from something Coleridge observed in John Bunyan: the way the allegorical characters of Pilgrim’s Progress step out of their types and suddenly become ‘real persons, who had been nicknamed by their neighbours’. Something of this unpredictable, arresting quality informs Barbauld’s character ...”

“... as a poet. ‘It is all a battle,’ he announced to his friend and partner in art, the painter John Minton. He and Dunsmuir lived in conditions of spectacular inconvenience: a poky caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ‘spartan’ doesn’t really do justice – ‘a leaking roof, no cooking stove, no electricity, an outside toilet ...”

“... and ascribed in part to the influence of Burke, ‘the use of spies and informers’ by John Reeves and the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. A mostly sceptical reader of Burke’s anti-revolutionary writings of the mid-1790s, Gillray cared enough for his Letter to a Noble Lord to pay it the homage of ...”

“... other, came to have a deep need for each other. It is extraordinary that his affair with Raymond Mortimer, to name only one of his many partners, or hers with Violet Trefusis, did not break up this odd marriage at an early stage. Not surprisingly, she would not play the orthodox part of a career diplomat’s wife. It is fairly clear that no great future lay ...”

“... papers were fragments of two plays: the pastorale called The Sad Shepherd, and a chronicle-play, Mortimer His Fall. The printed text of the latter concludes curtly, ‘He dy’d, and left it unfinished,’ furnishing an apocryphal vision of the aged maestro finally keeling over with the ink still wet on his quill. It was not probably like that, but Jonson ...”

“... all talking about the same house in a backstreet in Chania. Each of them had given the painter John Craxton a lump sum to repair it, in exchange for a half share in the ownership. None of them minded the imposture, which had been going on for about twenty years, and they all remained friends with Craxton, which says something about his character. His ...”

“... coming to the rescue of a government unable to finance its costly foreign wars. Indeed, Sir John Clapham, at the opening of his magisterial 1944 history of the bank, speculates that ‘had the country not been at war in 1694, the government would hardly have been disposed to offer a favourable charter to a corporation which proposed to lend it ...”

“... There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April ...”

“... continued their own war against Disney. Responding to the once famous middlebrow explainer Mortimer J. Adler’s defence of Disney as great art, Horkheimer sneered that ‘the sunbeams almost beg to have the name of a soap or a toothpaste emblazoned on them,’ and compared ‘the generation that allowed Hitler to become great’ to those ...”