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“... to the Signet edition. And it must be this kind of central, classic writing that made C.S. Lewis, in his Oxford history of non-dramatic 16th-century literature, speak of the Sonnets as not just the world’s best love poems, but in some sense its only love poems. By ‘only’, Lewis was possibly thinking in terms of ...”

“... in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom’. Carmen bin Ladin, the ex-wife of Osama’s brother Yeslam, and Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s widow, have published memoirs to respectful reviews. Azar ...”

“... Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz, Marilyn Monroe, Un Chien Andalou, Hart Crane, Ben Hur... An index to proper names in the book would be several pages long. This all-pervasive cosmopolitan glamorousness, often treated ironically, is most vivid in ‘7, Middagh Street’. 7, Middagh Street was the three-storey brownstone rented by George ...”

“... of the admirable rehanging in the Tate in recent years, will be more comfortable. Soon, perhaps, Ben Nicholson will seem no more advanced than his father, William Nicholson. Both will belong to what will by then be the last century. And the merit of those British artists who, like the curators, Holmes and Aitken, hesitated to embrace Cézanne will be more in ...”

“... Orchardson, RLS and the later Haldanes did not spring from nowhere. Still less, so to speak, did Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Such large mainly home-based figures as Rennie Mackintosh, MacDiarmid, Joan Eardley, still inspirational today, are not admitted into Smout’s pages to tease us or to cheer us up. More seriously, Smout neglects, not indeed all popular ...”

“... the historical method which is termed ‘prosopography’ above all from the work of the late Sir Lewis Namier, whose Parliament at the Accession of George III appeared in 1929. The method had been employed by Roman historians well before that time: Matthias Gelzer’s Die Nobilität der römischen Republik had come out in 1912, F. Münzer’s Römische ...”

“... have to think about how to pin those simple words down.Then there are the dirty words that Lewis and Short sell you very short on indeed, like irrumabo, which the Latin dictionaries will translate as ‘irrumate’, forcing the prurient teenager within to look it up in the OED. There you will find that ‘irrumate’ means ...”

“... he had discarded in conversation – and some of the unwisdom, too.In The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll, a Christ Church don, wrote: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ With Auden, also at Christ Church, it was the opposite. What Auden said three times you would begin to doubt and when he’d said it a dozen times nobody cared anyway. Auden ...”

“... of the sex lives of otherwise anonymous individuals, some of whom went on to kill themselves. Ben Stronge, an English chef ‘exposed’ in a story about swinging, begged the paper not to publish, because if they did he would never see his children again. They published, and he killed himself. Arnold Lewis, a Welsh ...”

“... Two centuries later, Chaucer wrote a technical treatise on the instrument for his ten-year-old son Lewis, who had a particular ‘abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and proporciouns’. Chaucer gave him an astrolabe to practise with, set up for use at the latitude of Oxford. He took it for granted that ‘every discret persone’ would want to know how ...”

“... third party: the Palestinians. This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress: If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country … We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to ...”

“... is packed. I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and unexpectedly rounded off by Ben, her middle son, who despite grief and nerves manages to say what his mother had meant to him and his two brothers. I couldn’t have spoken impromptu as he did and the congregation quite properly gave him (and Anne) a great round of applause. The boys then ...”

“... back. He is one of the last relics of madder, more eclectic days. The poet and environmentalist Lewis MacAdams claims that ‘in a Greek restaurant one night I saw him talk his way through an entire dinner, from the spanakopita to the baklava, without taking a bite.’ That struck a chord with me because some way into the first two parts of his projected ...”

“... forgotten it. Anyway, it seems fanciful but isn’t.1 October. Saddened by the death of the actor Ben Whitrow. A bookman, favourite and correspondent of Patrick Garland, he collected the books and articles of Denton Welch besides being a subtle and elegant actor who, as Olivier said, had never given a bad performance. He had written to me recently, delicately ...”

“... following Elizabeth’s death in 1861 Browning grew into a sage, with poems such as ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ (‘Then, welcome each rebuff/That turns earth’s smoothness rough’) apparently bringing comfort to the troubled intelligentsia. His sometimes blustering good cheer spoke with special eloquence to the serious Victorians who formed the Browning ...”