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“... and least reliable fictional characters: Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and George Darrow in The Reef (1912). Like other biographies tracking the ‘invisible lives’ of writers’ lovers – Claire Tomalin’s Life of Dickens’s Ellen Ternan, or the now-forgotten but interesting Portrait of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme ...”

“... share a concern with changing gender values, sexual ‘deviance’ and whatever else allowed George Gissing to describe the late 19th century as a time of sexual anarchy? Or has Showalter merely been able to present similar myths und images by cleverly shuffling the information – and there is plenty of it – that her research assistant has gathered ...”

“... his only son, Malcolm, born on the bonny banks of Lochranza, the beauty of which inspired Sir Walter Scott to the curmudgeonly reflection that ‘wake where’er he may, man wakes to care and toil.’ So it proved with the Macmillans. Malcolm prospered though hard work on his poor land, becoming a tacks man, a kulak among crofters, who served as an elder ...”

“... while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings which might be released only in their afterlife, as they came to be read in as yet unforeseeable situations. He thought much the same about history in general. The past itself is ...”

“... a world so wonderful for the ‘haves’ could not stay always secure. By the later days of Sir Walter Scott the dangerous forces of working-class unrest and political protest were deeply unsettling. Today we may relate that unrest to the increased share of the new prosperity of a modernising and developing society which had been mopped up by the ...”

“... that he has relied in part on ‘books written by two magnificent Victorians, Edward Walford and Walter Thornbury’: their works, first published in 1875 and 1879 respectively, contain much doubtful anecdotage and often come close to deserving the Athenaeum’s strictures. Exaggeration and egregious self-praise are, alas, also still with us in the ...”

“... happens when you skewer open the tin can which has been lurking at the back of the cupboard – Walter Benjamin’s ‘slice of pandemonium’. The detective shape-shifts but never quite belongs. The skein he unravels reinforces his isolation, as the bearer of a revelation which is too much for the recipients to stand. The constant motion of the detective ...”

“... enough to ignore him? Another example: in 1809 a duel occurred between two Secretaries of State, George Canning and Lord Castlereagh. Canning was the son of an actress and had never before fired a gun; Castlereagh was an Irishman who went on to commit suicide. Did their willingness to fight derive from the fact that they were members of Britain’s ...”

“... that the Atomic Energy Authority, or Con Allday and British Nuclear Fuels, or the men around Sir Walter Marshall in the CEGB, would have taken time off to authorise private detective agencies to rummage round the house of a 78-year-old former rose-grower who had written an elegant, though unoriginal paper on the arcane problems of nuclear waste disposal and ...”

“... in a live debate), Obama concluded by locking himself to the middle classes and John McCain to George Bush. Neither McCain’s folksiness nor his jokiness rang true (a quip question about a $3m federal programme to study the DNA of bears in Montana and whether it was about criminality or paternity fell flat). His repeated message was that Obama didn’t ...”

“... Walter Benjamin was not a letter writer of the order of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity ...”

“... refers in the letter to a number of acquaintances, some of them prominent, such as the jurist George Joseph Bell and the scientist Sir David Brewster, and some of them obscure. Close friends used to forgather with him at the house of Woodhall in the lea of the Pentland Hills, where the letter was written. The house was that of the philanthropic Miss ...”

“... own.     *Dead Centre, 1858Exactly halfway through his life, panning easton Princes Street, George Washington Wilson stoppedthe moving world into focus. After long exposure,ghosts returned to their bodies. Calton Hill roseat the top of the frame, the grave-slots of the cemeterya perfect memento. The first snapshot. Steady traffic.     *Atget Comes ...”

“... Mencken, were Damon Runyon, Ford Madox Ford, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Walter Winchell and Joseph Alsop, who was required to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune. Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa ...”

“... of this propensity, not romantic self-indulgence or nostalgia standing in for nationhood. Since Walter Scott’s time the wound has been bandaged up in kitsch, of course. But the dressings have become so famously elaborate only because the cut went so deep. Will it ever be healed? Perhaps, but not in Britain. That is, not within the old British polity which ...”