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“... more often acknowledged than explored. Fox’s concern is the imaginative literature of the age of John Skelton and Thomas More, and then of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey: literature which he believes to have been gravely undervalued, and which he commends not only for its intrinsic pleasures but as a rich historical source. What the most ...”

“... pattern. It’s the landscape the eye seeks, not any of the fields making it up. Most fields have no individuality to a stranger; at best, a fine oak in the middle, or a pretty horse grazing. Few can tell crops apart, or estimate a field’s size in acres. Visitors to the countryside see farms without seeing them. They see the odd farmyard, and they see a ...”

“... reduction onto councils, which account for around 25 per cent of total government spending. No other area of government has been subject to the same squeeze: since the start of the decade spending by local authorities has been reduced by 37 per cent, and is scheduled to fall much further over the next five years. For many councils this will mean the ...”

“... isthmus accessed by Shard-branded retail tunnels as dark and soul-sucking as a labyrinth with no centre. The era of station hotels has passed, those convenient stopovers at Charing Cross or Victoria before some Continental adventure or connection with a transatlantic ocean liner. London Bridge station, like its neighbour, Guy’s Hospital, is a tolerated ...”

“... to the war. Halfway down the forms ask: Do you need anthrax? Do you need smallpox? We answer no. I had the first anthrax injection in London last week. Paul hasn’t been vaccinated for either. You’re supposed to have three anthrax injections to be protected. We catch the end of the briefing, which turns out to have been mainly for those journalists ...”

“... unlike those of his master Carlyle, were defined by his commitment to the life of the family. No Victorian artist painted children with more attention and intensity. It was typical of Brown to focus his magnum opus on a baby’s face. The model for the child was his own son, Arthur, born in 1856. Work became in part an elaborate memorial for the boy, who ...”

“... he felt he ought to be performing some sort of public service. Conan Doyle, notoriously, had no wish to be remembered for Sherlock Holmes. Some word-spinners stood for Parliament, but tended to spoil their chances by putting up too many ideas of their own. Haggard, who had turned gentleman-farmer in Norfolk, fell into this trap when he stood ...”

“... it? The first thing to note is that Lawrence went to Oxford. As an Oxford man myself, I have no hesitation in identifying Aldington’s main problem as being that he did not: he went to University College London. ‘Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian.’ This quotation from The Importance of Being Earnest served as the epigraph ...”

“... up with strangers’ disgusting bodies is what nurses happily do for low pay; but then, there is no question of monotonously dealing in just what seems most private, fruitful, of their own: We worked on vaseline. That means we smeared ourselves with loads of vaseline and then afterwards got the sperm out. I only had time to wash after every four or five ...”

“... from the glaze in beholders’ eyes. Searching for the ‘real’ one is like chasing quarry in a hall of mirrors. In this delusive environment, Flint is an admirable Ariadne, who guides us close to the source of the reflections. She unwinds three distinct threads. First, she exhibits Columbus’s reading and map-reading. She scours the margins of his ...”

“... Ben Jonson became the first English dramatist to publish a collected edition of his own plays. No doubt The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, a folio volume of more than a thousand pages, brought a sharp satisfaction to its author. The indignities of an earlier career as a bricklayer could scarcely have been more roundly redeemed. Only the malice of a ...”

“... were awkwardly placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of ...”

“... that he had to ‘destroy’ his valet because he ‘threatened to propagate a report, and I had no alternative’. Whatever the truth, the event became a family legend, part of the romantic penumbra with which his son, vividly educated, imaginative and inheriting a clutch of family grievances, surrounded himself. The young Jones, named for the Duke, was ...”

“... a eugenicist brothel where Aryans were brought together to procreate. By 1947, Mann was no longer welcome either in Germany or in the US. According to his FBI file, he had been a ‘premature’ anti-fascist and was now under suspicion as a fellow-traveller, yet he was too melancholy for cold warriors in either country to take seriously. Regular ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”