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“... to knock the politeness out of polite letters, had a more direct and heady appeal to the young than a Guide to the syllabus would ever have. Leavis indeed knew his own business best. If the Establishment brainwashes the young, then it is not particularly good at it, and no one has done more than Leavis to show this ...”

“... Or rather, it resolves them by adopting a pose of wry detachment. Looking back from 1936 at that young and callow infantry officer, the author can allow himself the luxury of mockery. Yet in 1917 matters had been very different. What the Diaries record is the muddle of a man who chose an identity and then found that he could not function within it. Infantry ...”

“... it was Tom, who had not a tithe of the intellectual power of his brother Matthew, or of Arthur Clough, who alone gained Firsts in Mods and Greats. His friends and relatives despaired of his habit of ruining his worldly chances by a constitutional impulsiveness of character, beginning with his decision to emigrate to New Zealand at the age of 24 when ...”

“... though Chase (whose influence in Boston would have been of the kind to have interested the young Fenollosa in the Orient) seems more of a relativist. Knowledge of other languages and cultures, so desirable in itself, has nourished the paralysing scepticism that since Descartes has accompanied scientific and material progress. Chase’s friend ...”

“... or nurture – the pelican (not the first in Rego’s work) pierces its breast to feed its young – but the dynamic is sexual. The girl and bird are posed at an angle. Jane’s eyes are closed and her mouth stretched wide; she is needy, greedy, pained or ecstatic, the embrace a nightmare of assault or a dream of sustenance, perhaps salvation. Jane is ...”

“... Stein speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the ...”

“... they are caricatures not travesties. The Duke of Wellington, whom she knew when he was still Arthur Wellesley, in fact comes out of it rather well: dry, but kind in his way, and unpompous. She found his famous taciturnity exasperating: ‘tried him on every subject I could muster’ but it was ‘very uphill work’. What she liked was his directness. On ...”

“... that it has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”

“... funeral procession to Brookwood Crematorium required three special trains and was attended by many young men who were to be heard much of in the next century, notably Gandhi and Lloyd George. Lord Queensberry was also present, to bear witness to his loathing of ‘Christian tomfoolery’. So was Walter Sickert, who painted the enormous portrait of Bradlaugh ...”

“... many, both in Demosthenes’ day and in our own, would dispute. For Worthington, as for those like Arthur Pickard-Cambridge who made a hero out of Demosthenes a century ago, ‘patriot’ is a label that excuses many shortcomings and failures. Worthington admits that in his early career, Demosthenes’ speeches were ‘self-serving’ and political ambition ...”

“... the likes of Louis Cordier, Zacharie Astruc, Otto Scholderer, Pierre-Elzéar Bonnier, Jean Aicard, Arthur Boisseau, Antoine Lascoux and so on. And our pity contains an admixture, not exactly of guilt, but of unease: we are the posterity that has consigned them to oblivion. We look at these pictures – at first, anyway – as anecdotal, as documentary. It’s ...”

“... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...”

“... biographies since the 1990s, while The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), edited by J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, were reissued in 1997 and supplemented with Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell in 2000. Gaskell’s image, too, was transformed: the married woman whose earnings were pocketed by her husband, the Rev. William Gaskell, gave way to a canny, adaptable ...”

“... her up, while the New York Civil Liberties Union took her on.It was a great story, and I, then a young law writer for the New York Times, jumped on it. The case raised an important legal question: whether a person was free to leave his or her money to anyone he or she desired. But more intriguing was a cultural and even a psychological question: what kind of ...”