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“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... by knowing the first publication was anonymous). Are there readers who are ignorant of Arthur Henry Hallam and all that? Well, yes, there are, as any teacher of Victorian literature has cause to lament. The question arises: what does it mean to read such a poem without even the beginnings of contextual knowledge? It may be argued that the anthology ...”

“... for the TLS all this time? FW: Yes, though I stopped with a thud when Alan Pryce-Jones left and Arthur Crook came. I think I was too associated in his mind with the frivolity of the Pryce-Jones era. AH: Wasn’t the TLS lively and good under Pryce-Jones? FW: I thought it was, I loved it. It was very unLeavisite, or anything like that. I think it made Leavis ...”

“... to be written down, but like other such offers, this one is made only, I think, when one is fairly young. Most of us are self-sentenced to a year or more of un-epiphanic hard labour, made worse by a suspicion that it’s all a waste of time anyway. Morning after morning you go unwillingly to the desk, always accompanied by the treacherous notion that after all ...”

“... travels Scotland towards the end of his life, gauging morale and wondering what system could help young folk to flourish. Kenneth White, a Glaswegian based in Brittany and professor at the Sorbonne, is for ever wondering, as he walks the beaches of Western Europe, which place is home for him. Beveridge and Turnbull, ...”

“... was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned down on religious grounds by the first great love of his life, the daughter of a great Anglican family. In the aftermath of this rejection, he thought ‘a definitely agnostic atmosphere is essential for my free development of work and of ...”

“... Human Rights.) He is the chancellor of the International Monarchist League, a theorist about King Arthur, and a four-time parliamentary candidate for Ukip. According to The Making of the Novelist (2004), the first volume of his biography, excessive popular enthusiasm for the League of Nations, ‘self-indulgent expressions of concern for the poor’ and a ...”

“... picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his shoulder; Sir Joshua has his ear ...”

“... drove the swelling tide of revolution. Reading of them now, one is inevitably reminded of the young Russians of the same period and their excited dabblings in what their counterparts in the 1960s would call ‘alternative lifestyles’. Foster cites ‘feminism, socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-vivisectionism’ as beliefs impelling the revolutionary ...”

“... that the list had belonged to Eleanor’s suitor, now her husband. There is a suggestion that the young man’s persistent regard for cleanliness will keep him godly, despite his sudden elevation to rank and riches in the novel’s closing pages. Hughes notices how much of literary clothing deals only with feminine fashion, certainly in the period and ...”

“... felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his move to the US shortly before the ...”

“... to write a tragedy about a character with a completely transparent or apparently Cratylic name, as Arthur Miller did with Willy Loman. Here the ‘wrongness’ of the name for its literary kind is a way of marking the adversarial relationship between Death of a Salesman and tragedy as traditionally practised and conceived. The name insists that Loman’s death ...”

“... of participants is impressive, especially the American delegation: the dancers and choreographers Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer ...”

“... against a Romano-British tyrant, Artorius, whom Williams seems to identify with the original King Arthur. There is an incursion of the Vikings, the ‘black gentiles’, in AD 896: they fight the Cymry according to the rules of war – and a lower-class local is angry to see his leaders chatting, in sportsmanly, fair-play style, with ‘the Black ...”

“... the Communists, CND and (more frequently, more satisfyingly) real people – General Galtieri, Arthur Scargill, Ken Livingstone, Gerry Adams, Colonel Gaddafi, even (though they were beginning to scrape the barrel) President Delors. Peter Preston may not be in quite this league, more a domestic Jean-Luc Dehaene, but at least he is unequivocally an ...”