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“... the symptomatic content another. This distinction was made as neatly as it has been since in Charles Lamb’s once well-known essay ‘Witches and Other Night Fears’. Although much work in the Laingian tradition consists of failed attempts to establish that ‘the symptoms of the author’s favourite nut are actually quite comprehensible and therefore ...”

“... a biographer, already manifest in his detailed and persuasive studies of Tennyson, FitzGerald and Charles Kingsley, are at their best in that rich Victorian ambience where religion, art and sex mingled in an unself-conscious totality. He several times takes for granted in criticism or exposition that Hopkins is one of the ‘great’ Victorian poets, but ...”

“... and ‘the worm’s-eye view of life’ in seaside postcards. He was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill. A better reason for paying attention to humble work is to identify its virtues. At worst, this can become highbrow slumming – overpraising incompetence like an eager nursery ...”

“... and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible antiquity, being older than the Jatakas, older ...”

“... architect of genius’, the dust-jacket blithely announces, ‘comparable in stature to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’. Thomson’s rare talent matured suddenly in 1856, at about the time he and his brother George were forming an architectural partnership. The exact nature of Thomson’s relations with his partners remains unclear. George ...”

“... Charles Doyle’s biography of Richard Aldington opens so readily at the 24 excellent photographs with which the book is illustrated that the temptation to look at them, before one gets involved with the text, is irresistible. The series starts with a rather determined-looking boy with cap and striped jersey, holding a football ...”

“... typescript, 1951) Jack Kerouac, ‘The Slouch Hat’ (c.1960) John Cohen, ‘Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Corso’ (1959) Wallace Berman, Untitled (Allen Ginsberg, c.1960)PreviousNext These names belong to the original small group of friends who met in New York in the early 1940s. Within ten years Ginsberg had moved to San Francisco and ...”

“... havoc on reaching actual size, but he was less impressive and more sinister than that, a King Charles spaniel of vicious temperament, a cute Walt Disney rattlesnake, or a beautiful child vampire. He was hardly an angel in the 1890s, but he truly blossomed after Oscar’s death, when he converted to heterosexuality and the Catholic Church. Wilde called him ...”

“... seemed to be upwards of five thousand persons – ‘the size of the Jacobite army under Prince Charles Edward Stuart’, noted the Scotsman’s reporter – assembled on the tableland for the 250th birthday. Around 10 a.m. the queue of motor carriages stretched back down into Inverness. After a dry winter the sombre morass was a lot more walkable than ...”

“... fact and out of context. It’s worth having a look, however, if only for the quick camera pan to Charles Rangel, the 18-term black Congressman from the 15th Congressional district of New York, which includes Harlem, the Upper West Side and Washington Heights. He is smirking, regarding Obama like a crocodile gazing at a chicken McNugget. Rangel was one of ...”

“... Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as extraordinary: over a hundred men and women who had been ...”

“... select audiences, Morris observes, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharrett were frank about the reasons for Arab revolt against British rule and Zionist immigration from 1936 to 1939. The violence derived not from a Levantine strain of European anti-semitism, but from the fact that, in Ben-Gurion’s words, ‘we and they want the same ...”

“... is more generous to the other main agent in the building up of the modern Evening Standard. Charles Wintour was its editor for a total of 19 years – in one long stint of 17 years from 1959 to 1976 and in a shorter, and more stormy, one from 1978 to 1980. In my own one conversation with Beaverbrook about the Evening Standard – over lunch in the ...”

“... Charles Ashbee – C.R.A., as he asked to be called – must be counted as a successful man. He was an architect whose houses stood up, a designer whose work has always been appreciated, a homosexual who in his fifties became – almost absent-mindedly, it seems – the father of four daughters, and a dreamer who, by founding the Guild of Handicrafts, put his ideals into practice and then kept them going for twenty years ...”

“... fate to have stick to him all the pornographic and profane verse that emanated from the court of Charles II. Abstruse pornography has always had a special appeal for scholars, or rather did have, as long as they were unmated males living a collegiate existence. Most scholars are still loth to give up their frigged-out version of Rochester. Eleven years after ...”