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“... matter he also mishandled); and on his return to office three years later he decided not to defy George III by insisting on the admission of Fox into a strong coalition government; instead, he formed a weak, untalented administration John Ehrman’s final volume deals with the years from 1797 to Pitt’s death early in 1806. His biography is on a scale which ...”

“... pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form of ...”

“... and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ William Blake wrote these words near the end of the 18th century and set going the idea that Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic justifying the ways of God to men, had a twofold force: an orthodox ostensible meaning and a profoundly unorthodox unconscious meaning, the latter ...”

“... or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s anti-authoritarian scepticism. Turner acknowledged his allegiance to it when he donated Hogarth’s palette to the Royal Academy, while Constable donated Reynolds’s. This opposition, of the academic ...”

“... he was ruthlessly selective. Gone was the eclecticism of turn-of-the-century scholars like George Saintsbury and Oliver Elton, and of surveys like the Cambridge History of English Literature. In The Great Tradition (1947), Leavis reduced the essential canon to only four writers, dismissing once-great names with scant ceremony, interpreting Fielding as ...”

“... a kind of tea-break in the intellectual working day. An objection suggests itself, which is that George Orwell wrote about the ‘English national character’, and Orwell was not a man to write to no purpose. But consider what he wrote – viz. that ‘a profound, almost unconscious patriotism and an inability to think logically are the abiding features of ...”

“... psychology, followed by a convulsive shift to idealism, as we reach the great English Romantics, Blake and Coleridge. Roy Porter died, suddenly and shockingly, before Flesh in the Age of Reason was published. He got as far as writing a paragraph of acknowledgments in which he refers to an ‘endless proliferation of drafts’. The publisher says in a note ...”

“... but no one knows where they are, still less how to get there. The characters quote Yeats or Blake or St Augustine, but these glimpses of the moon are relics from college days. They don’t make any difference now, and we are a great deal nearer to the supermarket and the television commercials. The only note strong or poignant enough to cut through this ...”

“... off by the war the vacuum was filled by the extravagant romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one umbrella, and ...”

“... The publisher’s note on the jacket of George’s Marvellous Medicine says that ‘Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was voted No 1 (above Winnie the Pooh, Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland) in a Sunday Times survey to find the best ten children’s books.’ Even if the word ‘best’ is translated into reasonable terms (‘currently most popular’?), the claim remains impressive, and implies classic status ...”

“... ears’. Jennings talked and talked, a great gush of words: about art, theatre and history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather ...”

“... pronouncing that there is one who kisses and one who turns the cheek. Serious in all she did, George Eliot was serious about her friends. Passages from Middle-march, from her own letters and those addressed to her and from Edith Simcox’s Autobiography reveal a cult of friendship foretelling that of Bloomsbury to follow. Edith’s remarks show that the ...”

“... was obviously investigating that enormously important, mysterious and unexplored Victorian figure: George Drysdale. She was certainly doing this as well as I was – perhaps much better. Worst of all, the spoor was old, the campfire ashes long extinguished. It appeared that any minute the world would hear, if not the whole truth about ...”

“... American intellectuals of the first half of our century – especially those discussed in Casey Blake’s Beloved Community – targeted Dewey as a symbol of all that was immature, unreflective and dangerous about the United States. In 1926 Lewis Mumford said that ‘the deficiencies of Mr Dewey’s philosophy are the deficiencies of the American scene ...”

“... diatribes of this sort it comes at the weary end of a line that stretches through books by Peter Blake, Brent Brolin, Robert Venturi and others right back to Jane Jacobs’s epoch-breaking attack on Le Corbusier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, over twenty years ago. Of course, all this has guaranteed Wolfe a readership whose anti-modern ...”