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“... fine-fleeced sheep that adorns the frieze of the Parthenon (and looks as though it were drawn by William Blake himself), through the sheep of Byzantine mosaics and Mogul paintings, to those of the miniatures of a miscellany of breviaries, psalteries and bestiaries. The habitats of sheep in most countries of the world are illustrated and are identified in a ...”

“... beliefs to the Taylors. Though John was only three years older than Sarah, his prematurely white hair and grave demeanour made him a surprising choice for her. His letter of proposal, a ‘strange, joyless document’, as the Hamburgers call it, was unpromising. No fictional would-be husband in Jane Austen, George Eliot or Meredith outdoes Austin in ...”

“... of light’ (‘The Rosy-fingered’), and ‘I cannot stammer thunder in your sky / Or flash white phrases there’ (‘Fiat’). Stilted grandiloquence and mythic gestures abound. Syntax is often contorted, and the main point of many of the poems seems largely to outdo ‘The Extasie’ in argumentative knottiness. This strenuous manner survives through ...”

“... for whom the papers presume to speak turn out, on inspection, to be some fraction or other of the white ‘talking classes’, each ‘we’ is an imperialist, asserting its claim to be taken as the universal, the consensual ‘we’. Yet each ‘we’ can only be given an identity by specifying which groups it excludes, and which registers of ...”

“... to him. Newton’s annus mirabilis, 1665-6, in which he discovered the calculus, the nature of white light and the theory of gravity, was spent at her house; the apple fell in her garden. Manuel’s theory, put forward with judicious tentativeness, is that Isaac’s early separation from his mother left a wound that never healed. This accounts for his ...”

“... whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging class-based and region-based resentment, in themselves as in others, they refused ...”

“... version about her godmother, Panna Grady, her mother’s best friend and a friend and patron of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Janet was both disarming and bossy about showing her friends her work. When I first read the account of her arriving at boarding school with her mother, I was staying with her in Key West, in a house she had rented from ...”

“... on these pages. Wood, in fact, appears nowhere in the book, though Vickers several times cites William Wood, a 17th-century chronicler. Moreover, Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) has lots to say about class hierarchy and the inequalities of wealth; it would be a gross misreading of its argument to say it undervalues social ...”

“... of an emergent conservative movement.In particular, the Eisenhower letter provided an opening for William F. Buckley, the founder-editor of the National Review, to establish some distance between the honest-to-goodness hard right and deluded fantasists like Welch. Although Welch gave financial support to the National Review in 1955, he received little in ...”

“... hopelessly sidetracked by self-doubt and drink, has come to the village to write a novel about William Blake: ‘He read over the last few pages on the screen, making deletions and additions and willing himself into the story. He stood up and sat back down. He set his jaw and willed himself submerged. It was hopeless. It was like deciding to commit suicide ...”

“... intrepid sorts went to Dubrovnik and stayed in designated hotels, but that was all. So my father, William Woods, decided we should go. He was struggling to finish his novel Manuela (later made into a film, with Trevor Howard in the lead), and we were very short of cash. I suspect that he was also being pressed by several creditors. What better way to deal ...”

“... a frustrated patronage seeker who lay in wait for him at a Washington train station; and in 1901, William McKinley was mortally wounded by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. None but Kennedy died immediately (it is quite likely that with modern medical care both Garfield and McKinley would have survived). Kennedy’s death, Steven Gillon ...”

“... of Hertford in rooms upholstered and draped and carpeted in ‘flesh pink’, crimson, scarlet and white, with contrasting black-patinated bronzes. By chance an inventory of the contents of Lord Hertford’s villa in Regent’s Park survives which closely corresponds, although without the alarming carnal epithet. Other sources confirm his account of the ...”

“... some optical apparatus at a pair of Sylvester the Cats up on the wall; they were separated by a white space, and I had to use my eye muscles to bring them together, pulling them both into the middle so that one lay on top of the other. Looking at [Alexia] across the restaurant table, during my annual visitation, was like seeing two obdurately discrete ...”

“... of Art Masterpieces: with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated body of Christ on the Cross, which, since it figured suffering and Christianity, both outside the pale in my progressive ...”