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“... 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 ...”

“... their work, which often came at a high cost to him. What must he have felt, apprehensively, as he read, in a letter from Dixon: ‘I sd be glad to have your opinion of a narrative poem in couplets, of the Byzantine times, that I have,’ and what must he have felt, even more apprehensively, when he received the manuscript – was it ‘The Story of ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate ...”

“... it, infiltrates the dreams of the man he has told about it, the surviving writer, and is finally read again by the Master’s mistress: Levi Matvei trails Jesus to the Cross, Jesus dies and Judas Iscariot is killed by the Romans in order to embarrass the Jews. The scene in which Pilate, haunted by his part in Jesus’s death, nevertheless coolly schemes to ...”

“... podium’, but he was prepared to give the Hitler salute. A long-standing friend of Gadamer’s, Richard Kroner, taught philosophy at Kiel. In 1934, Gadamer reports, ‘fate intervened to throw Kroner off track’: that is to say, Kroner was sacked because he was a Jew. Gadamer took his job. Despite this little success, further balancing acts were still ...”

“... Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of 18th-century women’s poetry, Paula Backscheider quotes Isobel Armstrong’s framing of such questions in a suggestively ...”

“... vagrant punctuation, tmeses and promiscuously embracing parentheses’ resemble the texts he read as a Greek major at Harvard. The first passage here is by Sappho; the second by Cummings: [        ] Her[ Man[ And see[ms These girls al[l Topmost [ Wanders [ [            ] these [ [                ] Partner [ Own cousin ...”

“... years.’ Hence these are to be seen as ‘the diaries of a socialist-in-the-making’. What they read like, however, are the diaries of an effective politician on the make. Benn would certainly acknowledge as much. So far from seeking to disguise it, he makes clear that he is presenting his diaries as a grim moral tale. This places the reader in a ...”

“... allowed to infest the throne-room, Morris develops a mild form of megalomania. It is ghastly to read him when he takes credit for leaving the Bosnians to their fate, or for covering up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect ...”

“... without dates). The stripped-down nature of the book makes for a pleasantly uninterrupted read. But it means that one can never be sure to what extent Morpurgo is merely retailing, and to what extent he has properly sifted, hearsay, insider’s gossip, lore, legend and the embroidered accounts which flourish in the book trade around characters like ...”

“... Reagan is a man who is at ease. Such judgments flow easily from the commentators. Take the case of Richard Nixon. He is described as having been simply a politician, a pure politician without principle other than that of acquiring and hanging on to office. But how does this explain his reactions when he is in office? Then we are told that he is an example of ...”

“... of large ambitions. He showed how a writer was to capture the attention of a society that didn’t read. What an ambitious young writer in 1948 could be counted on not to notice was the way in which Hemingway had already become a prisoner of his own legend. Mailer actually appropriated the old man’s metaphor of writing as an on-going pugilistic competition ...”

“... Have you read Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol? In its own way this is an enlightening book and I like the manner in which the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s like a modern memorandum or a press release. Young Glen, though he can’t be so young today, had a good ghost writer in Pete Silverton ...”

“... on 22 October 1927, Virginia Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E. Page. In 1981, Niall Rudd wrote a short biography of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a ...”