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“... portrait. The only reading she mentions often is of contemporary best-sellers like Byron and Scott and Moore who were likely to be discussed at parties. She did enjoy the theatre, and to some extent music, but she has more to say about Rossini’s appearance – ‘a fat sallow squab of a man but with large, languishing eyes’ – than about his music ...”

“... is highly effective, but it can never produce what Henry James would have called ‘saturation’. Virginia Woolf remarked that A Handful of Dust was a brilliant novel but that she didn’t believe a word of it: a way of turning round the ordinary reader’s cliché to suggest that truth in fiction has a complex and even evasive personality which can’t be ...”

“... seem to her out of proportion – by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘The Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian ...”

“... not on mankind’s inalienable right to liberty. Fifteen years later, the same court, in the Dred Scott case, declared that blacks had no rights that ‘a white man is bound to respect’ – a more characteristic expression of judicial opinion regarding slavery. America’s historical memory of slavery tends more to amnesia, however, than ...”

“... a lot more than Chaplin ever did.Glancy’s companion (I refuse to say rival) in this quest is Scott Eyman, an American expert in movie history. His book on John Wayne from 2014 is extraordinary for its revelation of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the ...”

“... All the British rocketmen talk of the pleasure of working with very high levels of energy. John Scott-Scott was a hydrodynamicist at Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty near Rugby, who worked on conventional turbine engines before switching to rockets. He invented a turbo-pump incorporating a floating ‘cavitation ...”

“... of tobacco, on which Kiernan touches, is rather iffy from the radical point of view. Colonial Virginia and Southern Rhodesia rested on forms of peonage if not slavery, and Cuba is probably more disfigured than otherwise by its reliance on a tobacco economy. (Indeed, it would be interesting to study the degeneration of the Cuban revolution as a function of ...”

“... sitting in a control station thousands of miles away. Who could ask for more? In Objective Troy, Scott Shane explains why Barack Obama, when he became president, favoured drone warfare as his chief anti-terrorism tactic over the conventional wars of his predecessor: The number of al-Qaida plotters whose aim was to attack Americans was in the hundreds. Yet ...”

“... gun-rights fanatics carried their weapons to a rally at Fort Hunt National Park, near Alexandria, Virginia. But the tone of the anti-Obama protests has calmed down. The radio hosts now constantly remind their listeners that the surest imaginable vindication will come at the ballot-box in November. The results of off-year elections seem to bear out that ...”

“... Nation, Mew was summoned to a series of poetry readings given by the culturally avid Mrs Dawson Scott, who later founded International PEN. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ treats the case of a man inflamed with desire for his young wife, a wild little fay who runs away from him and is recaptured and incarcerated in her own house. It is remarkable for giving ...”

“... written by the three executive editors (Isobel Grundy taking responsibility for the early period, Virginia Blain for the Victorian and Edwardian periods, Patricia Clements for the 20th century). The supporting mass of scholars, one gathers, was used for the more exotic writers and for fact-checking. As a result of its extensively deployed woman power, the ...”

“... early satires. The weird Hollywood mix of trashy sensuality and vulgar confidence is embodied in Virginia, Stoyte’s pneumatic mistress. Her character and story parallels that of Marion Davies, Randolph Hearst’s lover, while her physical attributes recall Paulette Goddard (with whom, according to Loos, both Huxley and his son were taken). ...”

“... quality into focus. Was our curiosity about Kafka any different from our curiosity about Joyce or Scott Fitzgerald? It was, but how and why? Answers to these questions began to emerge as more and more of his writings began to appear: his diaries, his letter to his father, the batch of letters to Milena Jesenska and, finally, the enormous volume of letters to ...”

“... Though a West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is not absurd. It emerges that what is required for popularity is a certain reputation, occasional brushes with high life and lengthy diaries and letters filled with sharp gossip about your famous friends; and Waugh has the advantage ...”

“... whimsical that never quite coheres. As Harris explains, she has taken much of her inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a hard act to follow and not always a helpful influence. Harris describes her own approach in the introduction as having ‘tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it’. It’s an image ...”