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“... has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would figure in a dream ...”

“... in British captivity down the years, from (as I read my rain-stained notes) Vol. – Volunteer – Thomas Ashe, who died in Mountjoy Prison 25 September 1917, to Vol. Michael Devine, INLA, who died in the Maze 20 August 1981. Above is a dove of peace caged in barbed wire; below the quote: ‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform, nor meekly serve my time.’ Less ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

“... about whose life we know very little emerges by this measure as the undisputed Top British Person: William Shakespeare (1564-1616, ‘playwright and poet’) is allotted more than 30,000 words, a length achieved only by devoting a large proportion of them to various aspects of his literary after-life – about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The ...”

“... Bare and Bald’, Coleridge enjoyed calling her in private, with more antipathy than inspiration. William McCarthy quotes the Table Talk anecdote early on in his compendious and admiring new biography of Barbauld, as though obliged to get it over with, and makes the suggestion that Barbauld had unwittingly revived Coleridge’s severe hang-ups about his ...”

“... I feel certain, got it more quickly. ‘How long were you in Vietnam?’ he was asked in 1975 by William Heath, who later edited Conversations with Robert Stone (2016). Heath’s flat question was impossible to ignore. ‘Just a couple of months, something under three months,’ Stone said, ‘which is, I admit, not very long, but all I can tell you is every ...”

“... innovation of constructing an interlocking system of classes, terms and names was so significant, William Whewell argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific ...”

“... ought there to be a glossary, ‘ee by gum’ or ‘eeh baah gum’? (The issues are raised by William Neill when he prints two versions of the same poem on facing pages, both in dialect but one a good deal more dialectal than the other.) Since poets are not etymologists they may play fast and loose, as MacDiarmid did when assembling some of his lyrics ...”

“... it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the ...”

“... of the News of the World, then edited by Coulson, intercepted the voicemail messages of Princes William and Harry. Goodman was arrested, and the police found 15 confidential palace phone books at his house in Putney. They also found five thousand names mentioned in 11,000 pages of handwritten notes at the home and in the office of Glenn Mulcaire, the ...”

“... which is still reverberating five hundred pages later. At a dinner in 1834, the brewer Sir Thomas Buxton asked him for his life story: ‘I said to my father, “I will go to England.” I could speak nothing but German. The nearer I got to England, the cheaper goods were. As soon as I got to Manchester, I laid out all my money, things were so ...”

“... that views such as his have an eminent pedigree within the medical profession itself. The great William Hunter, doyen of the anatomy teachers of 18th-century London, delighted in offering his students a peculiarly chilling vision of the medic’s mentality. Surgeons, he told them, were eaten up with ‘emulation and contention’, operating in a ...”

“... evidently spring from a knowledge of Shakespeare and the great Metaphysicals, to which a touch of Thomas and a smack of Empson have been added for modernity’s sake. The effort to be colourful at all costs leads to such expressions as ‘the dank grass is tangled with the song / Squirmed from a blackbird by the probe of light’ (‘The ...”