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“... envenomed pen. As these essays indicate, he is much better at dealing with the monstrous legacy of Henry Kissinger than scoffing at poor Bill Rodgers of the SDP (as he and it then were). And Britain was also constricting, especially if you were a radical left-wing journalist with an upper-class accent and a taste for good port. You could always affect a ...”

“... Hopkinson’s appeared this summer, it was reviewed in the Sunday Telegraph by her father, Sir Tom Hopkinson, Antonia White’s third husband and formerly editor of Picture Post. He announced that it had been ‘produced in secrecy and haste for fear of copyright proceedings by Susan’, and went on about ‘a long-running dispute between the two daughters ...”

“... in for ‘sniping’. If you want a good book on dedications, look out for a second-hand copy of Henry B. Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books to Patron and Friend: A Chapter of Literary History (1887). Room lists it in his brief bibliography, so in plundering it he could be accused of plagiarism only by those who believe that there is such a thing as ...”

“... like life, are full of evidence. It is evidence that suggests the nature of relations, and as Henry James observed ‘relations stop nowhere.’ An author, no less than a lawyer, must ‘draw the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so’. From a literary point of view, Crusoe’s find was surely not so much evidence as atmosphere. What strikes ...”

“... sneered the American expatriate. ‘The game has no place in my life.’ I don’t know if Henry Miller was a football fan, but after reading his long-lost novel Crazy Cock, which was located by Miller scholar Mary Dearborn, together with Dearborn’s biography of the quintessential American writer in Paris, I suspect that a couple of Buds combined ...”

“... fortunes of the Earl of Warwick, but at the end of his life felt guilty for his betrayal of King Henry – as it happens, held prisoner in the same building as Malory, as Malory was actually writing. Many things still remain obscure, even after Field’s detached, painstaking, and blessedly unsentimental sifting of the sources. It seems unlikely that we will ...”

“... newer and even grander city, ‘which had no traditions but was making them’. As a character in Henry Blake Fuller’s novel The Cliff Dwellers admonishes, ‘Chicago is Chicago. It is the belief of us all. It is inevitable; nothing can stop us now.’ If the death and destruction wrought by the fire could be harnessed for a founding myth, the heatwave of ...”

“... he delivers, for instance, a devastating verdict on the fruits of Leon Edel’s monopoly on Henry James’s remains. Heirs, family and friends, in Mill-gate’s analysis, invariably act badly when entrusted to keep the flame: ‘authors eager to ensure permanent and undeviating compliance with their testamentary instructions’, he counsels, ‘would ...”

“... bumper stickers, for example, saying ‘Jane Fonda: John Kerry with Tits’. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’. A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and humane’ treatment ...”

“... and there was no doubt that more women than men were reading them. For most of the 1860s, Mrs Henry Wood and Margaret Oliphant outsold not only Trollope, but Dickens and Thackeray too. In the 1870s, it was George Eliot who reigned, and when Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd appeared in 1874 the Spectator declared that she must be its real author, and ...”

“... been allowed at the abbey. Samuel Pepys went to see the corpse of Catherine of Valois – wife of Henry V, disinterred during Henry VII’s rebuilding of the Lady Chapel. ‘I did kiss her mouth,’ he wrote in 1669. In 1806, having failed to ‘get’ Nelson after his death (he was buried in St Paul’s), the vergers had a ...”

“... an archetypal irony in The Mill on the Floss, set in the early decades of the 19th century. Tom Tulliver hates school so much that he counts the days until he can come home, cutting them into a stick; his sister, Maggie, who isn’t sent to school, longs to know what the Latin in his textbook means. Although these words are the very instruments of ...”

“... and his followers like about America is the cowboys-and-Indians bit, powwows and wigwams, tom-toms – and jazz (highly praised by Baden-Powell). It is the same with Asia, Africa and Australasia. British boys have been persuaded to enjoy jamborees and corroborees, to imitate Zulu trackers and Indian scouts, to learn campfire yells and Kim’s Game ...”

“... from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and Jane’s is one of them. She was beheaded in 1542, with Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard. She was one of Catherine’s ladies, and for reasons which remain inaccessible to us, she had helped the dizzy little person carry on a love affair with a courtier, Thomas Culpepper. She passed on letters and misled ...”

“... do hate to give up their claims, however. Well into the middle of the 13th century, John’s son Henry III was still insisting that he was the rightful duke of Normandy. And in a longer perspective, Henry’s reign, and those of his son and grandson, the first two Edwards, represent a mere century’s intermission during ...”