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“... book seeks to rescue one exponent of this cliqueish art-form from the dust-heap. His hero is Anthony Alsop (1669-1726), Pickwick among poets, a figure whose donnish and parsonical life was disturbed only when in 1716 he married the widow of the former incumbent of his living in Berkshire. He was promptly sued by his mistress for breach of promise and had ...”

“... others’, as the blurb mildly puts it – and now with an introduction in which to receive Anthony Blunt. The new prefatory statement is interesting in itself, and throws light on the already existing material. Rebecca West collects traitors. Through four decades she has pinned down a startlingly large number of them. The genus has several ...”

“... tried to calm the situation; Henry and Ferguson turned up too. Henry told the prosecution under cross-examination that he thought Grant-Murray, who had been stabbed a few weeks before in Henry’s company, was in danger. ‘My natural instinct was to help him,’ he said. The prosecution case was that Henry had a knife in his shoulder bag. But there was no ...”

“... hotel, had called Joyce ‘that refurbisher of skivvies’ stories’. As O’Brien’s biographer Anthony Cronin rightly pointed out, ‘it is charitable to assume that O’Nolan had already begun to hear too much about Joyce’s influence on his book from his readers in Dublin, whether friends or enemies.’ In 1961 O’Brien wrote to his editor: ‘If I ...”

“... home with him. When they disappeared, nobody cared, except, perhaps, Dennis Nilsen. I am sitting cross-legged on the carpet, drinking and listening to music ... I drain my glass and take the phones off. Behind me sits Stephen Sinclair on the lazy chair. He was crashed out with drink and drugs. I sit and look at him. I stand up and approach him. My heart is ...”

“... statism’ cannot be extended if it cannot be paid for. The nominally represented do get cross if they have been encouraged to ask for what they want, have become used to having it, and are then denied it. There is nothing surprising in any of this. There is scarcely anything very interesting in it. But what of the solution? Should the ...”

“... is even the case that many practitioners of the other social sciences consider sociology a heavy cross to bear in a hostile environment. Little comfort comes from historians of the more general kind: modern history and economic history continue to see each other as alien cultures, and the advent of the computer has made the divide more acute. The modern ...”

“... such juntas and advise the Crown, into an argument that lasted for more than sixty years. And as Anthony Pagden explains, this argument can also be read as the start of what one can retrospectively recognise as anthropological thinking in Europe. Indeed, Pagden’s subtle account of it is a model for the history of anthropology altogether. It shows, too, how ...”

“... about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark tries to dodge his attacker, a heavy-set white man appears to restrain him, readying him for martyrdom. In the bicentenary year of America’s independence, Forman’s photograph was a reminder that, despite ...”

“... see the Royal Family, from the formal studies to the candid shot. I was surprised to discover in Anthony Holden’s book how recent a development this is.* He quotes the Duke of Windsor: ‘I grew up before the age of the flash camera, when newspapers still employed large staffs of artists to depict the daily events with pen sketches ... Because our ...”

“... project, it’s also one that stands on its own feet. An affinity with the fiction of Anthony Powell has been caught, but this is not a novel. It is not a memoir, though it eats the memoirs of others, plankton-fashion. It is a species of history – annals, perhaps. Kynaston’s far from copious political judgments are sensible and ...”

“... Anthony Trollope once proposed to write ‘a history of English prose fiction’, but ‘broke down in the task, because I could not endure the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect ...”

“... wide-swinging relativism the uncommitted term ‘voice’ has a special part to play. The title of Anthony Thwaite’s Victorian Voices seems to go beyond a use of the word to describe the Browningesque dramatic quality of these 14 verse monologues. It suggests also his subjects’ ambiguous relation with the real, their semi-symbolic function: they are ...”

“... The other day, I found myself in a taxi queue with Anthony Blunt. He looked frayed but fervently cheerful, much as if he had just been dug out of the ruins of his own bombed house. Never mind the furniture, the books and the glass: the ceiling had come down, but the dear old family dining-table had taken the strain ...”

“... which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. [Emphasis mine.] On page 222 of Anthony Summers’s vastly enjoyable and revealing book, we find J. Edgar Hoover’s lovely home in Rock Creek Park being done up at taxpayers’ expense, complete with ‘hand-crafted fruit bowl’ and ‘a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI ...”