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“... and indulgent of a few quite particular locales and their architectural attractions. It has always read as if it would rather be titled A Guide to the Architecture of NW1. The structural approach that Jones and Woodward take in dividing up London is almost comic in its refusal to accommodate the city’s districts as they are actually experienced and lived ...”

“... He thinks that literature itself – rather than theories about it – is our best guide to how to read critically, and he has devoted the better part of a long career to this conviction. Kermode is a working critic and proud of it. When he does turn to the sustained consideration of questions of theory and method, it is almost always in the interest of ...”

“... To read the letters of Dorothy Richardson is to become exhausted, vicariously, by the ‘non-stop housewifery’ which consumed her days. From 1918 until 1939, Richardson and her husband moved three times a year. Every autumn, they settled in a primitive rented cottage in Cornwall, where Richardson was responsible for shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as for her own and her husband’s sizeable correspondence ...”

“... interviews. At their press conferences, questions have to be submitted in advance; the answers are read from a script. Relations with the media, as all other aspects of their lives, are regulated by the Imperial Household Agency, a conservative organisation staffed largely by bureaucrats of mediocre ability and well-developed arrogance. But the senior ...”

“... on the Elector of Saxony (and, presumably, Frederick the flautist), insisting that we ought to ‘read’ the B minor Mass not only for its ‘astonishing demonstration of piety and invention’ but as an instance of this crawling servility: ‘the awe we feel in the Credo ... reinforces the separation between ruler and ruled, and this in turn is made to feel ...”

“... and the Lords of Karma, the Hyperboreans, Lemurians and Atlanteans. Theosophists did not read this part, but were attracted by the society’s benign general aims of uniting religions and promoting brotherhood. As Theosophy prospered and spread, two important cults diverged from the main stream. In 1913, the German branch, led by Rudolf ...”

“... of your editor and referees, and when you answered the copy editor’s queries, and when you read the proofs. As you collect references across the span of your book, you are sure to find mistakes and inconsistencies. They are not only irritating: they provoke anxiety. Can they still be put right? It’s a race against the printer’s schedule. Yet if you ...”

“... into elegant but on the whole unoriginal digests. As the project progressed, and Montaigne read and wrote and relaxed into the therapy of writing, these five-finger exercises became something much greater. The later essays move beyond the simple juxtaposition of authorities, not only to wonder about the foundations of human knowledge, but to display a ...”

“... in Ecuador. Later he worked in Chile, where he set up technical schools, teaching his pupils to read and write, and then showing them how to make bricks, tiles and candles. He is remembered in Chile for appearing naked in anatomy classes – there were no spare corpses. He eventually returned to Ecuador, to the small town of Latacunga, and died there in ...”

“... sketch reveals, existed as a collegium for the new humanism. More taught his children to read Greek and Latin by affixing letters to an archery-board and encouraging his pupils to fire arrows at them. The prosecutor of later years could bear to chastise his children only with a peacock-feather. He and his wife, Alice, played the lute together, like ...”

“... aimlessness. It does little to describe the poem. It gives even less idea of what it is like to read it, and not the slightest hint of why Browning should have written it in the first place. Perhaps the old fox had a point after all. We have to start again, and aim at another point of vantage. Two stories are bound up in The Ring and the Book. One is the ...”

“... There is a case for thinking that the crucial conversion was that of Edmund Burke’s father Richard, and that Burke grew up knowing that his father had publicly renounced as an ignoble superstition the Catholic religion which Edmund’s Nagle mother, and later his Nugent wife, continued to practise. O’Brien eloquently and convincingly argues that ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... More drew on Sallust and Tacitus to compose his study of tyranny in The History of King Richard III. Shakespeare, inspired by More’s history, departed from it in loyally contrasting Richard with his virtuous Tudor successors. More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”