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“... Englishman and a brilliant ship’s captain but a blunderer on land, strikes up a friendship with Stephen Maturin, an introverted Irish-Catalan doctor whom he takes aboard as a surgeon. There are naval battles and lengthy explanations of different types of sail and other nautical details. But the plotting – at least in a narrow, screenwriterly sense – is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... also shows beautifully on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialled steely young man (‘one of Ezra’s more savage disciples’, Yeats called him) posing in Rapallo in 1930 or 1931 on the cover of A Strong Song Tows Us and the New Directions Complete Poems, to the waggingly eyebrowed, scruff-bearded, snaggle-toothed, twinkling-eyed ...”

“... Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and ...”

“... and drugs offences. 114 are serving life sentences, including Dennis Nilsen, who strangled 16 young men at his flat in North London. A year ago the paedophile, Leslie Bailey, was murdered in his cell. There is a greater concentration of high-security prisoners at Whitemoor than at any other jail in Britain. On Saturday, 10 September, the day after the ...”

“... Dandyish in dress, affected in bearing, snobbish in choice of acquaintance, he was the sort of young person who admired H.L. Mencken for the wrong reasons. He seems also to have been interested in impressing a ghastly-sounding Mama, though she would have been less delighted to learn of his amateur homoerotics than of his easy resort to conventional ...”

“... her helpful analysis of Sloane’s library, Wilkins’s work was one of the first folios which the young Hans Sloane purchased when he reached London as an ambitious apothecary in the early 1680s. Decades later, various drafts of his will underlined the high religious purpose he reckoned such collections should discharge, especially ‘the manifestation of the ...”

“... in Oscar Wilde’s footsteps, Loy decided to become a work of art. Her first marriage, to Stephen Haweis, an English painter and photographer, was unhappy. The strain of Haweis’s numerous affairs and the death of their daughter, of meningitis, two days after her first birthday, led to their separation. However, when Loy became pregnant as a result ...”

“... sunken, lustrous invalid eyes (he had nightmares about finding himself in bed with a fat woman), young men with the kind of body you now see in jeans advertisements, Greek drapery, Renaissance bowers and flowers, all seen in a curious dusky light – his people flee the sun like ghosts at cock-crow and come out as the last light gilds the hilltops, their ...”

“... 1926, apparently by suicide; his mother then married the family lodger, a man called Berryman; the young boy was sent to a boarding-school, a sport-fixated establishment at which he was never happy, and completed his American education at Columbia College, New York; he took up a scholarship to Cambridge (England) from 1936 to 1938, returning to America and a ...”

“... four hours every day – just in case she was taken ill in the night and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her ...”

“... it.’ Such ideas were anathema to the egregious McCaffrey. ‘There could be no worse message to young people,’ he insisted. ‘Just when the nation is trying its hardest to educate teenagers not to use psychoactive drugs . . . they are being told that marijuana is a medicine.’ Many other psychoactive drugs have a recognised place in European medicine ...”

“... led his platoon over the top on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, holding a gun to one young man’s head to get him to stop crying and keep going. Almost immediately afterwards, Tawney himself was shot through the chest and abdomen and lay for 24 hours in no-man’s-land before being rescued. Although he lived with pain for the rest of his ...”

“... Tessimond’s poems uninspiring (‘impression of yr. work neutral’), but he did furnish the young poet with the addresses of a number of magazines in America and Europe, and a few years later This Quarter, based in Paris, published ‘A painting by Seurat’, which was among the batch submitted by Tessimond to il miglior fabbro for comment. On the back ...”

“... it may be an exaggeration to say that you get used to this way of writing, you learn to trust it. Young writers are routinely advised to find their voice, but for Irish writers voice is as much the problem as anything else. To indulge the national stereotype of garrulousness is one sort of trap, but it’s possible to react against it too much. Dublin talk is ...”