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“... or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing masters’. As Swift’s dim bishop might say, it’s hardly possible to believe that a nation which entirely lacked the objects of satire could exist on this earth. To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays ...”

“... thought should be in the air; an aroma of the personality.’ This is certainly true of his Cicely Alexander and Carlyle portraits, and one is astonished that Roger Fry could have said that his painting ‘lacked humanity’ and could see no more than pure abstract design in the mountainous and disturbing outline of the overcoat and hat in the Carlyle. Where ...”

“... biography of Bruce to have been published in over two centuries. The first, by the Orientalist Alexander Murray, which is included in the second and third editions of Bruce’s Travels (1805, 1813), is brief but important, revealing discrepancies between Bruce’s original notebook and his subsequently published narrative. The second, much ...”

“... taking meals on his own at irregular hours, and napping at his desk when he was tired. His masters might get exasperated with his serene self-absorption, but he continued to bring credit to the house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ...”

“... Arnold Böcklin, two of the first teachers at the painting academy established by Grand Duke Carl Alexander, would later become major artists, but both left within a few years, repelled by the philistinism of local notables and the formality of the court. A generation later the 25-year-old Richard Strauss was hired, but like others before him felt blocked by ...”

“... of the Balkans’. He is in a Bulgarian café as it explodes with joy at the news that King Alexander of Yugoslavia has been assassinated, and in Ruse entertains his landlady by singing a Marlene Dietrich song backwards (he is English, after all). And one night, south of Varna, he falls off the rocks into the sea and recovers in a cave full of ...”

“... The precision of the attack is astounding, and is matched by the bluntness of the condemnation. Alexander Theroux is scolded for ‘pseudo-elegant variation’ when he switches from ‘which’ to ‘that’ in mid-sentence. Worse still, the sentence in question is in any case ‘a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate’. Even greater names are not spared. An ...”

“... were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and Negroes grew insolent to their masters.’ For Adams, a radical when it came to independence but not to the social structure of the new nation, this egalitarian upheaval was an affront to the natural order of things. For others, it was the essence of the American Revolution. Newly empowered ...”

“... and manual, displaying the work of luminaries (it includes prints based on drawings by ‘the best Masters’ of the day, artists such as Francis Barlow and the French academicians Charles Le Brun and Le Clerc) while framing the task as fundamentally accessible: ‘Made easier to the comprehension of Beginners than any book of this kind hitherto made ...”

“... coaches such as Bob Rotella, who is credited with helping Rory McIlroy to victory in the US Masters this year. Rotella reckons that the best way to hit a good shot is to learn to live with the bad ones you’ve already made and will before long make again. ‘We begin with the idea that golf, by design, is a game of mistakes, and if you love golf, you ...”

“... end of the Chapman/Johnson/Marston collaboration Eastward Ho! as anything but a delicious spoof. Alexander Brome gets dismissed in a single reference as a mere purveyor (along with Beaumont and Fletcher, Shirley and Davenant) of ‘courtly elegant Cavalier drama, or ... light comedy foreshadowing that of the Restoration’. The issues at stake in Covent ...”

“... Alexander Pope’s slur has loomed for centuries over the reputation of Eliza Haywood, the most prominent female author of her day. In The Dunciad, she is the prize of a pissing competition held between talentless hacks:   Who best can send on high The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky; His be yon Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes ...”

“... Yet even with this surviving if vestigial knowledge, it is quite hard to make out the sense of Alexander of Ville-Dieu’s mnemonic verse, which starts: ‘Rectis as es a dat declinatio prima’ (‘First declension nouns have -as, -es, -a, for their endings’); this is immediately qualified by ‘As well as -am in some proper names taken from ...”

“... has therefore been excluded. The case for treating Chekhov as one of the few acknowledged masters whose minor masterpieces, not to speak of his potboilers and shavings, laundry lists and every last word, need not be bothered with is hardly unanswerable: but it would probably carry weight even at the best of times for publishers, and it is unlikely to ...”

“... authors whose names are whispered among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only ...”