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“... called inventio (‘discovery’). When all else failed, hagiographers could resort to plagiarism. Gregory of Tours explained why one should speak of the Life rather than the Lives of the saints: ‘Although there may be diversity of merit and power, one life of the body [of Christ] nourishes them all.’ On that principle, no one’s the worse if episodes ...”

“... behind by More. At times, he seems to have known exactly what lay ahead. In his History of King Richard III (1513), he wrote that ‘kings’ games ... were stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds.’ The ‘More part’, indeed. At other times, only we, in retrospect, can see how the ironies of this life buckle. Who else could have ...”

“... the big time. (In Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, Thiel appears as the oddball visionary Peter Gregory, who can see connections that everyone else misses, such as between the patterns on Burger King buns and the price of sesame seed futures.) But having put his money into Facebook, Thiel did his best to take it out again. In 2006 he tried to persuade ...”

“... and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their paymasters (Richard Burton, for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was ...”

“... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...”

“... the work of writers like William Blisset and Herbert Knust. I would have added John DiGaetani’s Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, which was published four years earlier, but Martin claims that a book of that title ‘by Bernard di Gaetani’ was ‘under preparation at the time of writing’. The chapter on Yeats is a tissue of fancies (Lady ...”

“... two excerpts from the Mukhtasar fî’l-Duwal, a chronicle by the 13th-century Syriac Christian Gregory Bar Hebraeus. As Bevilacqua puts it, the volume endowed the history of the Arabs and of Islam ‘with the same dignity traditionally afforded to that of the Greeks and Romans’. It was Pococke who showed that the dove story had no Arabic or Muslim ...”

“... Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert ...”

“... 57 stanzas (based on the stanza Yeats adopted from Abraham Cowley for ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’), the modern poet speaks the first and last four, while Bradstreet has the run of the middle section, ultimately resisting his attempts to knock her off her ‘hopeful and shamefast, chaste’ and pious course. The poem is as visibly costive and ...”

“... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...”

“... of Poetry, accepted five poems; in April 1915 two of her poems appeared in the Egoist, the paper Richard Aldington edited (‘I am so delighted to have them take me I shouldn’t mind if they charged me’); in August, HD invited her to come to London (she didn’t take up the invitation); and in October Alfred Kreymborg, the editor of Others, took five ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...”

“... Two sets of boots had flowers spilling over the tongues: L Cpl John Van Gyzen IV. 21. MA. Pt 1 Cl Gregory Huxley. 19. NY. The number of dead is mentioned on a board, but the figure ‘907’ is printed on a piece of paper that flutters in the breeze; every small gust allows you to see the number ‘906’ underneath. A heap of shoes stands by the path to ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... and independence of mind. Out of that we get the poems of Yeats and the journals of Lady Gregory. Out of that, too, we get Sir William Wilde and his wife. ‘Of late years,’ Yeats wrote in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), ‘I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family history.’ Yeats recounted an old Dublin riddle: Question: ‘Why are ...”