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“... was the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history ...”

“... likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do women; and has denounced Henry James and the semicolon. Among Roth’s mouthpieces is the oracular cleaning lady Faunia Farley in The Human Stain, who corrects the notion of the protagonist, a former professor, that sex is about more than sex: ‘No, it’s not. You just forgot what ...”

“... a Dostoevsky novel,’ a place full of ‘the imagination of disaster’ – the phrase comes from Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too ...”

“... Florian. It’s surprising they didn’t think to use ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ as a slogan before Audi did: ‘Advancement through Technology’ is Kraftwerk to a T.We never quite get a sense, from Uwe Schütte’s account of this cusp moment in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, of how or why Hütter and Schneider took their new pan-European direction ...”

“... from Franciscan ‘grey friars’ and Carmelite ‘white friars’. The monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538, whereupon its five-acre precinct became a prime piece of Tudor real estate. Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare and the Countess gives a remarkably detailed account of its residents in the 1590s, some of them very distinguished, and of their ...”

“... wife’ does not. Amidon’s story, ‘Echolocation’, turns out to be about a man called Henry Keating who also has a wife: ‘Henry made his wife take out the trash, even on nights she worked overtime.’ Henry’s wife has the edge over Martin Amis’s wife, in that she gets to ...”

“... Fanny has had a long gestation. In 1961, as an undergraduate, she was taught by the late Professor James L. Clifford, Johnson’s biographer, who had the admirable policy of inviting his class to imitate an 18th-century author instead of writing yet another academic paper on him. At the time, Ms Jong came up with a mock epic in heroic couplets in the manner of ...”

“... the Times, Lords Hailsham, Drogheda, Carrington, Goodman and Weinstock, and Messrs Roy Jenkins and James Prior, said they felt it was a good time, in view of the new publicity about the Ward case, to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the ...”

“... manner highlighted to the point of overdetermination in the battle scene near York in Act II of Henry VI Part 2, when the stage is simultaneously occupied by a nameless father bearing the corpse of the son he has just killed, and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the ...”

“... a greater role than has been realised, and Camden a correspondingly smaller one, in the story of James I’s attempt to commission a history of the reign of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, which would exonerate her from complicity in the Darnley murder. Yet what evidence is there to support the assertions that Cotton ‘played an important part’ in ...”

“... where they do things differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed ...”

“... In Modern Times York promises to tell ‘What’s Really Happening’ to everyone – not just Henry and Caroline. He still assumes that what’s happening is best explained in terms of style, and still concerns himself only with things that can raise a laugh, or at least a chuckle. But York is now looking at all of modern life as a single system of ...”

“... alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother ...”

“... spies on her housemates from the privacy of the attic and sees ‘Fleur and Alan coming together, Henry and Ingrid under pressure, Simona and William falling apart’. Her novel will be based on their pillow talk. In the second week of the holiday she suffers a reverse. The cameras are discovered and an angry guest contacts the press. A tell-all story ...”

“... The final day of monastic life at Evesham witnessed the standard process of surrender by which Henry VIII’s government took possession of these ancient and supposedly perpetual corporations; but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire ...”