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“... Williams’s ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’. And you may say that his luck holds: for Robert Green is also an admirer, but his book is thoroughly sensible, unbedazzled and discriminating, the book of someone who has heard of other writers and is in no kind of ‘Special relationship’ to Ford. What he has set out to do, and it is a wise economy, is to ...”

“... hundreds of millions from investors, despite warnings from a number of prominent people, including Henry Kissinger and Shirley Temple. We think of a good con artist as someone who is able to present himself as a legitimate and trustworthy businessman, cannily deflecting attention away from the sketchiness of his scheme by various demonstrations of ...”

“... act with that intent, even if you didn’t share it. On the afternoon of 6 August 2013 Alex Henry, Janhelle Grant-Murray, Younis Tayyib and Cameron Ferguson, all aged 20 or 21, were involved in a fight in an Ealing street. The fight lasted around forty seconds and resulted in the death from a single stab wound of 21-year-old Taqui Khezihi; his brother ...”

“... awful because the first thing I thought was, Well she’ll never get that out. He had on these green Y-fronty things which I’d have thought were a bit young for someone who’s retired, but Henry’s the same, suddenly takes it into his head to go in for something he thinks is a bit more dashing. Little Terylene ...”

“... on returning from exile he had explicitly sought sanctuary there. Only the public penance of Henry II and an exceptionally rapid canonisation could satisfy burgeoning devotion to the new martyr. But Becket’s prominence was unusual, since most sanctuary seekers were poor and desperate. As a legal practice, sanctuary relied on what Allen calls ‘divine ...”

“... Mr Todd, to whom he is condemned to read aloud the works of Dickens in perpetuity. Waugh told Henry Green that the novel was about ‘a Gothic man in the hands of savages’ – savages both at home and abroad – ‘and the civilised man’s helpless plight among them’. It is the Black Mischief parallel effect again: the latter pages of the novel ...”

“... gifted’, ‘the young African-American writer to watch’. Whitehead’s new novel, John Henry Days, is longer and more ambitious than The Intuitionist, and the suggestion in its title of mythic black strength and suffering, together with its encyclopedic range, raise epic expectations. Is this that most elusive of leviathans, a black Moby-Dick, the ...”

“... at the International African Institute, just as the community portrayed in her last novel, A Few Green Leaves, has clear affinities with Finstock, the village near Oxford to which she retired. On the central question of the interaction between her artistic and her emotional life we shall have to wait for Hazel Holt’s biography for authoritative ...”

“... Henry James’s injunction to the novelist was ‘Dramatise! Dramatise!’ Ezra Pound advocated ‘the presentative method’. A dozen lesser but important voices have urged that modern fiction must enact, not tell. The strongest intellectual pressures on the serious novelist in this century have all been, that is to say, in the direction – the ultimate direction – of the playscript or the screenplay and away from the elaboration of prose as prose ...”

“... Royal in London; Regulated from the Prompt Books of each House (1774), and more recently the Henry Irving Shakespeare (1892), or the versions of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet released by Oberon Books in conjunction with productions by English Touring Theatre (2002-7) – this one does not claim the authority of specific recent ...”

“... Catherine of Aragon was Henry VIII’s first and longest-lasting queen, at the heart of his glittering court for almost two decades. In the early years of their marriage, the Spanish princess, daughter of the most glamorous monarchs in Europe, must have seemed every bit as regal as her husband. Yet in the historiography of Tudor England she has become a shadowy figure, a sad frump eclipsed by her savage husband and the brazen mistress who supplanted her ...”

“... inherent, and ultimately insoluble, ambiguities about Herodotus’ own beliefs and intentions. Henry Immerwahr’s 1956 study of causality in the Histories (why did they fight each other?) identified an interlocking pattern of themes: the rise and fall of rulers; the dangers of expansionism; and the powerful impact of vengeance, divine as well as ...”

“... Mandy Grunwald, who held the position in the Clinton campaign of the novel’s sexy heroine Daisy Green, says that ‘finally the modern campaign – and Clinton – have the novelist that they deserve.’ (I don’t think he means to be snide.) Dissenters such as Tom Carson, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, seem disappointed that ‘the book isn’t ...”

“... unsettling directions. In both novels, for example, Margot’s sister, Clarissa, and her husband, Henry, get divorced. In Liars and Saints Henry goes off to Sacramento to be a state senator; in A Family Daughter he’s killed in a car crash. Having written the story of the Santerres one way, Meloy seems to have been unable ...”

“... Library, contains the only surviving copy of the late 14th-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It lacks a title and shares the manuscript with three other poems of a devotional character, also without titles, and probably, according to the experts, by the same poet. Of this group Pearl, an allegory about a man’s grief at the death of his ...”