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“... presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining performances on radio (particularly in Any Questions?) and television. By the time of his election to the Liberal Party leadership in 1967, succeeding Jo Grimond, Thorpe had established a platform that ...”

“... observes of Holman Hunt’s early painting Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother (1849) that the dead boy stretched across the foreground resembles Christ in Francesco Francia’s Pietà, whose limbs ‘looked too thin and too long to those trained in normative anatomy’, she does so in the knowledge that the acquisition of ...”

“... is also present, but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl Ove Knausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has called such books ‘agony novels’, but agony by itself isn’t usually enough. The third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle is immersed in the ...”

“... present at the destruction' of the ‘West’, the ‘world’s most successful political idea’. Edward Luce, for example, a Financial Times columnist based in Washington DC, isn’t sure ‘whether the Western way of life, and our liberal democratic systems, can survive’. Donald Trump has also chimed in, asking ‘whether the West has the will to ...”

“... possibilities providing the principal subject of plays as diverse as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall (1603-5), Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632). According to Perry, this is in large part because the favourite made conveniently visible a central problem with ...”

“... them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its effects embrace even the bewildered Humberstall – they save his life. The battery is wiped out by enemy action. Humberstall staggers shell-shocked away, muttering about ...”

“... The young Noel Coward thought E. Nesbit was ‘the most genuine Bohemian I had ever seen’. Berta Ruck called her ‘the Duchess’. Nesbit set herself up as the complete Edwardian: a free-thinker, a matriarch and a madcap. She bobbed her hair, carried her tobacco in a corset box, and acquiesced in her Fabian husband’s disdain for the suffragettes: ‘Votes for women ...”

“... to say, a three-quarter inch replica in painted gold, which I at once passed on to the next pretty young woman I met to hang on her charm bracelet. The relevant correlative? A little ethnic gesture to catch another little ethnic vote. In a word, politics. What I now sardonically call my memory flew next to a neighbouring State where another gentleman of Irish ...”

“... St Petersburg, he was the ringleader of a group of literary boys with close contacts to the best young Russian writers – including M.A. Kuzmin, a predatory but thrillingly rebellious gay who roped the young Mirsky and his friends into a homoerotic salon. Politically, Dmitry had no time for the doomed efforts to turn ...”

“... gone down in real terms and ‘it’s hard to corrupt anyone now on £70.’ Indeed the risk for young writers is that they may love the job too much. ‘Waking to the flop of the jiffybag on the mat, he knows it as the sound of the beginning of a good day’; the piece he does will be published quite quickly, while the book he neglects in order to meet the ...”

“... guide his flock and give direction to his life. The problems of the flock are various: Shirley, a young woman whose gay husband has run off with another man, is lonely, and her son is more deeply damaged still by his father’s desertion. Norah, a retired nurse, is unhappily married to a barrister who grieves petulantly for the domestic efficiency and ...”

“... effects: what of the content and manner that produced them? It is, obviously (how well we now know young Tom!), all about fashion and style, and it purports to be an account of how the fashion for modern architecture was foisted on America by foreigners. In other words, it continues a traditional Isolationist/Conspiracy-theory attitude roughed out around the ...”

“... a sleepless week in a haunted house, without being acutely frightened – merely very tired.’ Edward Leeves’s journal existed as a kind of memorial to his love for a Lifeguardsman who died of cholera at Chelsea Barracks in 1849. ‘Recollections! I am heartsick of everything, & long only for that peace which is nowhere but in the grave.’ The very ...”

“... Calverley’s Schoolmaster Abroad with his Son, which I have never seen in any anthology for the young, would have been far more suitable, though the Dragon editors, schoolmasters themselves, might have thought it subversive. O what harper could worthily harp it, Mine Edward! This wide stretching wold (Look out wold) with ...”

“... pictured on the jacket of this book, on which the photograph powerfully, inevitably, alludes to Edward Hopper. Whatever is going to happen around here is likely to be depressing: possibly just a marital argument, more seriously a fire in a neighbour’s house or the death of a child. Such happiness as can be expected must be looked for on fishing trips, and ...”