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“... George Robey, Harry Lauder, Dan Leno and Vesta Tilley rubbed shoulders with the likes of Sir Henry Wood, Sarah Bernhardt and the Ballets Russes. Dickens was fascinated by the performing style of Charles Mathews, a blacked-up minstrel, and put it to use in his own public readings, though without the burned cork. T.S. Eliot revered Marie Lloyd, and the ...”

“... to look at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the Catholic Herald and how, via a 17th-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, it eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed ...”

“... theatres, parties and country-house weekends. He begins to wonder if he has fallen into a Henry James novel, with Rosemary as the beautiful worldly corrupt European villainness. He turns out indeed to be as spellbound as Chad in The Ambassadors, for when the long-awaited peace-making letter arrives from his wife Roo, he doesn’t answer it. Yet he ...”

“... which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul’ should degenerate into nonsense, and Fielding differentiated his honest characters, the naive and the stupid, from their victimisers, the hypocritical and fraudulent, according to whether they depended on physical appearance to reveal or conceal the truth. This, however, was before Johann Caspar ...”

“... of drawing-room melodrama, as well as the jumbled idiosyncrasy of thought: I am not a cold woman, Henry, But I do not feel for you, What I feel for the elephants and the miasmas And the general view. In an essay she wrote for Medical World in 1956, Stevie Smith talked of the tricks fatigue played with what she saw and what she wrote, of how everything became ...”

“... authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their molluscs, entomologists their butterflies: why shouldn’t literary critics indulge ...”

“... with an idiolect designed to describe but not circumscribe the workings of the brain.One reader, Fielding Blandford, attracted opprobrium when as the administrator of an asylum he connived in the kidnapping of a young woman, Edith Lanchester, who had been driven mad, or so her family believed, by ‘over-education’. Lanchester’s plight ...”

“... there are forty occasions when someone has a drink. It begins in Gorizia, where our hero, Frederic Henry (he’d better have his name; we’re going to be with him for a while), sits watching the snow falling while he drinks a bottle of Asti with a friend. Later, over too much wine and Strega, he explains to a priest his regret at not having gone to ...”

“... the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James ...”

“... to play in the World Cup. In the evening, to a Waterstone’s gala dinner. The first speaker is Henry Cooper. He says something relevant, apropos Mike Tyson: ‘when someone goes arahnd bitin’ people’s ears off and punchin’ refs, that only tells me one fing: ‘e doesn’t want to be in the ring.’ Precisely. Cooper’s other good remark, about the ...”

“... The Victorian invention of the lobby correspondent, a role filled by men like William White or Henry Lucy, brought parliamentary debates alive for the newspaper reader. The correspondents usually did this by dwelling on the MPs’ individuality: their mannerisms, their dress, their hobby-horses. This humanised the institution and undermined radical ...”

“... hegemony of Dead White European Males they have helped to bring such neglected writers as Sarah Fielding into the canon. Theory has drawn attention to marginalised groups, making it harder to ignore the ‘black-creole face of Bertha Mason’ in Jane Eyre. Above all, Theory has highlighted the importance of literature in constructing the realities we ...”

“... debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message that the public could get behind. Henry de Zoete, a former digital director at Vote Leave and successful Dragon’s Den contestant, suggested advising people to stay at home. Guerin, a New Zealander, noted that ‘stay home, save lives’ had worked well in other parts of the world. Cain proposed ...”

“... are full of just the feeling to which Coleridge admitted on putting down Clarissa and taking up Fielding: ‘like emerging from a sickroom heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May’. Their letters circle round and round the idea of Elizabeth’s relationship with the world outside her window, of which Robert is the representative: ‘I ...”

“... with honour’ reminiscent of Mendès-France, and his devious National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Both had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, both had travelled widely (Nixon as Pepsi-Cola’s lawyer), and both grasped that there was no Communist monolith needing to be contained. In March 1969 there was heavy fighting on a disputed island ...”