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“... about whom and Harriet Beecher Stowe he writes his best criticism, the father is obviously White Master, though there is also White Mistress, in whose capacity to read and write, and in her willingness to teach them both to a young slave, Douglas begins to discover the instrument both of freedom and revenge. Fear of ...”

“... nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my reach’, and he began seeking out the company of these people, who were members of a ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... Waterloo Bridge and the Adelphi. The destruction of the Adelphi was deemed ‘inevitable’ by the William Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance ...”

“... A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal mixes. He was in a white shirt, unbuttoned to expose ‘chunks of magical Buddhist gold’. The hair had recovered its collartickling insolence. The voice was strong, warm and macerated in phlegm. He had the genial, tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill ...”

“... spending programmes. Another hint of vitality is the traffic. Cars, carts, trucks and yellow and white Corolla taxis swarm past bearded old men on three-speed bicycles. They slow down at roundabouts and come to a halt near the highest walls for a hundred miles. Rising above the parapet, a concrete fortress casts its shadow over the soldiers outside. A taxi ...”

“... gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy ...”

“... escape, Friar Balbi, but wins over the reader by buttonholing him directly. In The Casanova Fable William Gerhardie and Hugh Kingsmill throw away all these possibilities by transposing the story into the third person, and furthermore adopt a disapproving narrative voice; their odd little book is eventually going to turn into a mock-judicial arraignment of the ...”

“... to harp on in a biography of an artist who expressed his genius almost exclusively in black and white. Ineptitude is something Ms Benkovitz carries to a pitch where it seems inspired. It must be a Muse of Ineptitude who directs her towards artists who least abide literal-minded question: Firbank, of whom she published a biography and a bibliography in the ...”

“... already had a couple of unsettling epiphanies this soccer year. Out of habit, I battled my way to White Hart Lane on the first day of the season, expecting to savour the ten-year-old’s sensations I’ve been savouring for thirty years: the verdant sward, the August sun, the eager, shirt-sleeved throng and, best of all, the certain knowledge that my ...”

“... of Auberon Waugh. Under the guise of satire, humour scourges rich and poor, weak and powerful, white and black, reactionary and progressive, young and aged alike, with an even-handed injustice. It is immaterial that some are armoured and others defenceless. The joke is all, the sicker the better. And the fulcrum of the balance is a middle-class, middlebrow ...”

“... Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the Nidderdale hamlet of Birtwhistle, offers his view of the evolving English village. Both books communicate the enjoyment that their authors have had in compiling ...”

“... cases that symptomatised the loosened sexual mores adopted by certain segments of society. White-collar felonies were supplemented by what might be called dinner-jacket offences. Sir Charles Dilke was undone by the mendacious accusations of Virginia Crawford, and Parnell by his liaison with Kitty O’Shea. And then there was the Marlborough House ...”

“... words. Fergusson wants the great lexicographer to be fed, among many other oatmeal-rich dishes, ‘white and bloody puddins routh,/To gar the Doctor skirl, O Drouth!’ Here Watson’s line-by-line glossary will assist the uninitiated, who may feel that they have come a long way from the Latinate English of ‘the frost subdu’d, / Gradual, resolves into a ...”

“... art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation that links her to Homer’s ...”