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“... compendious alibis put forward in extenuation of Eden by his faithful biographer, Robert Rhodes James. Why, then, by 1951, had Lloyd risen so high in the Conservative Party, to which he had only finally committed himself as late as 1944? One explanation is that he had a good war behind him. He was one of the ‘Tory ...”

“... imperative of Greenblatt’s opening sentence: ‘Let us imagine that Shakespeare … ’ James Shapiro has no truck with such surmise. Though he too is plagued by the biographer’s hankering to enter the playwright’s mind – ‘to know … what his political views were, whom he loved, how good a father, husband and friend he was, what he did with ...”

“... fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am no woman. Keep your tires to yourself. Nor am I Pericles Prince of Tyre.’ Indeed, one way to suggest a noisy crowd circa 1609 was to invoke an audience for Pericles: describing a packed ...”

“... assurance that, his fears dispelled, he now shares our rejoicing in eternal life, the gift of that Risen Lord who here on earth he did not yet know.That’s one way to do it. In a valedictory poem published in the LRB (6 February 1986), Clive James made a similar point, though less unctuously:A bedside manner in your ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... been unavoidable, however, when Sansovino was given the commission for the colossal statue of St James – one of the series of 12 Apostles that Michelangelo had agreed to carve eight years before for the Cathedral of Florence, but abandoned after having only started to carve the St Matthew. Sansovino worked on the St ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... assembled and unevenly printed volume has commanded which preoccupy the first volume of Anthony James West’s The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, and they provide a very remarkable instance of the interplay between literature and the market, prompting all sorts of reflections on the curious relations between cultural capital and the real ...”

“... response to a request from the Chinese Emperor for a good doctor and some aphrodisiac drugs, or Dr James ‘Rhubarb’ Mounsey, who was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts for his efforts in acquiring and cultivating medicinal rhubarb (imported to Europe via Russia from Tibet, Mongolia and China). Cross describes the ...”

“... they wouldn’t be seen dead in one at home?’ British fears of Masonic conspiracy have never risen to the same pitch as on the Continent or in the United States, not least because our history lacks an adversarial Enlightenment and its culmination in a violent democratic revolution. The French Revolution unleashed a reactionary critique of secret ...”

“... has become a magnet for investors disappointed by the low returns on the Continent, and has risen by a quarter since last summer, pricing British manufactures out of some foreign markets. Industrial production in the UK contracted in May. At some point, it is believed, businesses will fail, throwing their workers onto the state, and the British public ...”

“... he fell in love with an innkeeper’s daughter, and wrote her a naughty poem, ‘Christ is Risen’, in which he promised, today, to kiss her like a Christian, but tomorrow, if requested, to convert to Judaism just for another kiss, and even to put into her hand ‘That by which one can distinguish/A genuine Hebrew from the Orthodox’. Some of ...”

“... Légion d’Honneur in 1988 and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1992, shortly after he had risen from his sickbed to receive his last standing ovation at the premiere of his production of La Bayadère. He died on 6 January 1993. An elaborate funeral cortège made its way first to the Palais Garnier and then to the Russian cemetery in the distant suburb ...”

“... which is a pity, because there’s a challenge here which he has identified but not quite risen to: a novel which imitates the newspaper format in every respect, with illustrations, classified ads, even horoscopes and TV listings all playing their part in a single narrative which would have to work its way up, I suppose, to a sporting ...”