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“... time in France with one of the people who was to contribute generously to the fund, the painter Richard Wyndham. Sitting outside a café in Toulon, he told Wyndham that he was a ‘Narcissus’ and probably a ‘bugger’. People, Wyndham remembered him saying, are only friends insofar as they are of use to you. Lewis, it seems, did not so much bite the ...”

“... exile. The Romantic fashion for foreign times and places was well and truly dead: Tennyson’s English Idylls, his Arthurian epic, cast Browning’s Gothic grotesques, his Renaissance dukes or painters, into the shade. So, it might be argued, did Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s thoroughly contemporary Aurora Leigh, published in 1856; she, unlike ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... speculative capitalism that gave rise to the semi-Brutalist office and housing projects of Richard Seifert, such as the Anderston Centre in Glasgow, a half-finished and shoddily renovated sub-Barbican of monumental towers connected by walkways across a raised podium. Seifert, as Hugh Casson pointed out, had ‘loyalty to his clients’ where other ...”

“... The Reign of King Pym, a masterly study of Parliamentary politics during the early years of the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since then he has published no single full-length work of historical research. The ...”

“... as being the most reliable custodians and distributors (Clause 1 guaranteed the freedom of the English Church). Simultaneously, the 25 barons who were to oversee the Charter under the crucial Clause 61, the ‘security clause’, sent letters to all the county sheriffs, instructing them to take an oath of allegiance to the Charter and to elect 12 knights ...”

“... too good for wrapping up chips but not worth binding, keeping, annotating or editing. Very little English literary criticism has lasted as long or worn as well as Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. It shaped the canon of English poetry and set the terms for critical discussion of Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope ...”

“... stamps, and when in 2011 a set of eight stamps was printed celebrating magical figures from all of English literature, two of them were from his best-loved children’s book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. His standing as a Christian apologist has risen even more remarkably in these years. At the time of his centenary, Christianity ...”

“... guard at Buckingham Palace’). The translations from the French are slovenly: in a dedication an English woman should not write and an English-speaking French woman would not write, ‘To my husband, who I would love even if he were not my husband’ – Who whom? Would should? Howard Spring’s Heaven lies about us is ...”

“... Protestants. The controversy is not confined to Paris and the French, however: authors writing in English are amongst those under examination. Lloyd de Mause, for example, in his History of Childhood proclaimed in 1974 that the further you go back in time, the less love is to be found in the family, and the more brutal the treatment of children. Edward ...”

“... seem to have been both immediate and final, like the effects in his own books. In 1956 he reminded Richard Usborne, author of Clubland Heroes, of the source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that ...”

“... step from Thucydides to Liddell Hart or G.M. Trevelyan. Howard, who wrote the first history in English of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and a brilliant volume in the official history of grand strategy in the Second World War, demonstrated long ago his mastery of military history in its classical form. But he was also an innovator. He recognised the need ...”

“... to draw from the results. Dr McIntosh has said bluntly that it was ‘at no time’ a ‘typical English community’. Until James I started to listen to those who preached retrenchment, the Crown was an exceptionally undemanding landlord. The Crown’s inertia as a landlord is familiar, but Havering had the further peculiarity of being ancient ...”

“... do. In 1835, aged 32, he was in St Petersburg, arranging the printing of a translation of the English Bible into Chinese. (‘He boned up feverishly on Manchu,’ enthuses his other biographer, David Williams, in his schoolboyish way.) Borrow had to argue in Russian with the Tsar’s board of censors, hire and supervise ill-educated Estonian compositors ...”

“... this moment is life but so was the last one. The two moments connect: Ashbery says he likes the ‘English’ spelling ‘connexions’. In ‘Drunken Americans’ the poet sees a reflection in the mirror, a man’s image                                                        fabricating itself Out of the ...”