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“... problem of creating a European Community cannot be denied if it means – as a little help from Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary suggests that it does – What a frightfully laborious business it was, constructing the Roman nation.) Lord Roll’s memoirs are cool and bland, full of balanced judgments and informed good sense. There is hardly a harsh word ...”

“... she asks her mother. Her mother doesn’t know, presumably because she has no dreams at all. Lewis Carroll’s Alice is some way from getting married, although that horrible fate does loom in the prefatory poem to Through the Looking-Glass. There we hear that a ‘voice of dread/With bitter tidings laden,/Shall summon to unwelcome bed/ A melancholy ...”

“... of the actors, however unsteady the film’s general grip is on what it’s about. Daniel Day-Lewis, in what we hope is not his last film, is Woodcock, so innocent and engaging at moments, so nasty and tyrannical at others, that we may find ourselves believing the character is a single person only because there is just the one actor. Vicky Krieps is ...”

“... suicide, and 44 after his big book The James Family: A Group Biography, here is R.W.B. Lewis, Matthiessen’s pupil at Harvard, with one on the same subject, nearly as big. Its very title twists a touch awkwardly to avoid repeating that of its precursor, to which Lewis acknowledges a large debt. But The Jameses ...”

“... War in a fashion incomprehensible to those who view it only through the writings of the war poets. Lewis Hastings, born in 1880, had run away from Stonyhurst to South Africa aged 18, and roamed that country thereafter as hunter, policeman, prospector, star rugby player and not unsuccessful part-time politician. In 1914 he led a national recruiting campaign for ...”

“... 1663-64, 1685), followed by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 plays which had never been printed before, quite ...”

“... taken on as a fiction editor, aged 24, by the boss of Penguin, Allen Lane. ‘It seemed,’ Jeremy Lewis records in Penguin Special, ‘as if he was interviewing Lane for a job, rather than vice versa.’ At one editorial meeting Lewis describes, the phone rang. ‘I thought I said I wasn’t taking any calls,’ Lane ...”

“... imports. The poetry section is still weirder: Larkin one can understand, from Hamilton; also Alun Lewis, Roy Fuller, Frost and Graves. But Wilbur and Merrill, Heaney and Motion? I’m not surprised there’s little evidence of attachment to their work, just oblique dismay. For any sort of poetic credo, you have to go back to the poems, or the essays in A ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... years old and feeling it, found himself for a while in the custody of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s magazine, the English Review, and who was about to launch a magazine of his own, the rather more intemperate Blast. Gripping Ford by the elbow, Lewis, who was as usual in ...”

“... French, then ordered it to be surveyed by a government expedition led by army captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. For Jefferson, American topography was material proof of his country’s promise. His Notes on Virginia, ostensibly an answer to queries put to him by the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, is also a robust answer to Buffon and the other ...”

“... with impressive credentials: for example, the former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Lord Michael Carver, the former chief of the British Defence Staff; Bruce Blair, who has written extensively about nuclear command and control issues; Fred Iklé, who headed the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Ford; and Stansfield ...”

“... and intellectual militant, even though he was in the opposite camp to Williams’s own. C.S. Lewis, author of academic classics such as The Allegory of Love, died in 1963 in his 65th year. Today his memory stays alive far from the academic world, in the reading of children and Science Fiction fans, and in Christian bookshops where I have seen whole areas ...”

“... more secular world. Ten years ago one might have dismissed this as a throwback to the days of C.S. Lewis and his like, when the attempt to find Catholic allegory in the late romances was a recognised minority sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a ...”

“... but it was a start, appeared in March 1838, with the death of Maidstone’s other MP, Wyndham Lewis. Disraeli was not inexperienced in love – or what he would call ‘love’ – and seems to have made plain his need for maternal attentions. He needed someone to help him out of his financial mess, as well as someone who understood the nature of his ...”