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“... believe that he had the wrong ideas, but also among historians of the Namier school, especially Lewis Namier himself, who believe that ideas don’t matter much in politics and that Burke was dishonest in pretending they did when in reality he was just a biddable grafter like the rest. Is it possible that such critiques may rest on not having actually read ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be ...”

“... than ignoring, say, Matisse from among many other foreign contenders for their attention. With Norman Reid, who became director in 1964, priorities were decisively reversed. The transitional figure is John Rothenstein, director from 1938 to 1964. Spalding does full justice to his complex personality and mixed achievement. The thrilling episode when he ...”

“... her Janie O. Gene Kelly called her Brunhilda. Bob Hope called her J.B. – for Jut Butt. Jerry Lewis called her Sylvia, but James Garner called her Sylvia-honey. Rock Hudson called her Eunice and sometimes Maude; she called him Ernie. Her son called her Sis. The character actor Billy de Wolfe called her Clara Bixby, and this is still what her friends call ...”

“... not to this ethnic-political entity, the ‘New English’, but to the ‘Old English’, of Anglo-Norman descent like the family names of Burke, Nagle and Nugent, and historically Catholic. His family were converts to the Church of Ireland, much like the conversos or ‘New Christians’ of 16th-century Spain, who maintained in private the religion they were ...”

“... ideas. One was to send his agents to break into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr Lewis Fielding, in Beverly Hills. They were hoping to find material they could use to blackmail Ellsberg into silence and perhaps also to embarrass Dr Fielding into testifying against his patient. However, the burglary of Dr Fielding’s office on 3 September ...”

“... investment. The Modernist will to literature found its most vivid polemical expression in Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, organ of the Great London Vortex, which managed two violently iconoclastic issues, in June 1914 and July 1915, before collapsing. Kenner devotes some apocalyptic pages to Blast, in which the journal causes immediate and widespread offence, costs ...”

“... dolly bird into a chic, confident dresser’. He bought her schoolgirl uniforms from John Lewis and made her wear them with rubberised cotton macs and red tights. But the more he insulted her and dressed her like a prostitute, the more she loved herself. By 1974, they had changed the name of the shop from Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die to SEX, and ...”

“... the Anglo-Saxon from the fifth century on, the Norse in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the Norman Conquest of 1066. The last of these had surprisingly little immediate effect on the language, though it did set up the conditions for major borrowing from French later on. The Scandinavian takeover of several counties in the North and the Midlands caused ...”

“... birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the building of Peterborough, 184 from the Norman Conquest, 79 from the martyrdom of Becket and 34 from the lifting of the interdict’.The calculation of time was crucial to daily observance. The seven and later eight liturgical hours of each day began with Matins at around 2 a.m. – for Dante the time ...”

“... family friend in a drug deal, he employs as his partner a former schoolfriend, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), from whom he had drifted apart after Johnny joined a gang of skinhead racists. While they busy themselves disavowing their cultural obligations and falling in love, all around them is chaos – Omar’s uncle’s mistress is poisoned by his ...”

“... of the Sixties, the everlasting financial crisis which seems finally to have been solved by Lewis Golden, the accountant on the white horse who Wells sees as a figure as heroic as Carlyle in the annals of the Library. All the other large and small circulating and subscription libraries of the Victorian and Edwardian eras – Boot’s, Mudie’s and ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were ...”

“... the Rose Street milieu of 1950s Edinburgh. For a time, Brown mixed there with Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and other poets and literati. With its prostitutes and smoky, male-dominated pubs sporting signs which stated ‘Women Not Supplied’, Rose Street was a shithole of gender politics, emblematic in some ways of the Edinburgh ...”

“... of French Left intellectuals after the war, as Anne’s forced choice of DeBreuilh over Lewis Brogan parallels DeBreuilh’s forced break with Henri and choice of the Soviet Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for Sartre, Camus and herself, she announced ...”