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“... and charismatic figure expounded was the value of fables. Which kind of fable, Apollonius is said to have asked his companions, is the more philosophical: the kind found in the poets, or Aesop’s? His respondent, one Menippus, replied: the poetic kind, of course. There is no value in Aesop, just ‘frogs and donkeys and rubbish for old women and ...”

“... mentioned ‘the gaslight phenomenon’ in the late 1960s. In 1981, two doctors, Victor Calef and Edward Weinshel, gave an account of gaslighting in Psychoanalytic Quarterly: the ‘victimiser’, they wrote, tries ‘to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy, and the victim more or less complies’. As Kate Abramson explains in her new book, On ...”

“... frustrates the mind that wants social fictions or biographical revelations. This needs to be said in order to clear the ground for Vendler’s brilliantly focused way of reading the Sonnets. but these lyrics do not seek to shake off the dirt of the public world – often they wish they could, but the ugly dangerousness in the youth’s personality and in ...”

“... whole being dissolve in love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently ...”

“... at Fettes remembered him as a consummate performer. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was said to have an ‘almost music-hall style of speaking’, while his son greatly admired the music-hall comic Dan Leno and would sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb ...”

“... the importance of the issues at stake. ‘Keith should have become Prime Minister,’ Thatcher said at his memorial service. ‘So many of us felt that was his destiny.’ He himself was engagingly frank in discounting this scenario, saying that ‘it would have been a disaster for the Party, country and for me.’ Certainly, he never looked back with any ...”

“... downturn, 364 academic economists signed a letter to the Times. ‘The time has come,’ it said, ‘to reject monetarist policies,’ since ‘there is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control and thereby induce an automatic recovery in ...”

“... word ‘ethics’ was making an audible comeback against the word ‘power’, someone definitely said ‘character’, and at least one of the main panels was largely devoted to showing that the Author was a lot less dead than Foucault.) Foakes’s purpose isn’t merely to refute and dismiss the critical vogues of the last decade, but to meet their ...”

“... caused great trouble in the shop by making enthusiastic advances to an unstable young dogsbody, Edward Shelley. More than a year before Shelley was to give evidence at Wilde’s trial, his co-workers were addressing him as ‘Miss Oscar’ or ‘Mrs Wilde’. A report of Wilde’s arrest had had the headline ‘Yellow Book Under His Arm’, and although the ...”

“... cannot explain.’ Empathy is often inexplicable. The next journey is to Bredfield, birthplace of Edward Fitzgerald, and thus of Omar Khayyám as we know him in English. Of FitzGerald’s versions of the Rubáiyát, Sebald observes finely that they ‘feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an ...”

“... lives by herself with her infant son James, having refused to marry, or to live with, his father Edward. When her mad mother, Mopsa, comes to stay with her, James is taken ill and dies in hospital. Mopsa then kidnaps Jason, another boy of the same age. We are introduced to Jason’s family, where Barry lives with the nymphomaniac Carol, the child’s ...”

“... was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else. Edward Garnett, Conrad’s literary adviser and intimate friend from early in his career, observed that his ‘ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make matrimony extremely hazardous’. The novelist was in fact subject to long bouts of depressive illness, and ...”

“... of ‘neurofibromatosis’ – and instead of Aeschylus and Sophocles we have the goat-songs of Edward Deblasio and Joel J. Feigenbaum. Sue Ellen’s drinking bouts are a hangover from the Bacchanals of Cithaeron. Blake Carrington’s ‘I’ll be in the library’ harks back to the oracle (who today, in the shape of a doctor, accountant or lawyer, can be ...”

“... He studied at the Royal College of Art, in the design school not the painting one, where he met Edward Bawden. The two shared a love of neglected landscape watercolourists – John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer; they made a pilgrimage to Palmer’s Shoreham in 1926. Paul Nash, who taught them at the RCA, described their ...”

“... lives converged. Her closest friend was the eyebrow-raising Rosina Bulwer Lytton, whose husband, Edward, was a close friend (and possibly lover) of Disraeli’s. When they first met in 1832 she struck him as a ‘flirt and a rattle’. They became closer in 1837 when Disraeli was elected for Maidstone as a Conservative MP, with Wyndham Lewis as his ...”