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“... in pretending to help people capture Robin Hood. He is the only figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold ...”

“... Powell offered members and voters a politically potent vision of a Conservative patria in a way Edward Heath never did. At many points during the last 150 years, Tory backbenchers and members have been frustrated by the inability of their leaders to provide the inspirational direction they crave, though they have often struggled to define what that might ...”

“... there was one devell too many amongst them.’ They explained the situation to the audience, and said they ‘could go no further with this matter’. The audience promptly fled – ‘every man hastened to be first out of dores’ – and the players spent the night in unaccustomed prayer and meditation. For some, such anecdotes suggest, Faustus was a ...”

“... most admired, whom he had learnt from, before whom he ‘felt humble’. Leavis, Priestley said, ‘did mischief to the art he was boarded and lodged to serve’ – rather a revealing comment. ‘To be an author was to invite damnation’ at the hands of his critical Calvinism. The two had in common a secret dissatisfaction: Priestley with the writers ...”

“... his heart ... For a while he thought that she understood ... ‘But death is nothing,’ she said ... he was struck dumb: he had forgotten that he spoke to an alien intelligence, that would not suffer the rebellious creed that was his. It is as though Sassoon is unable to acknowledge his own rebellion. Perhaps this should not surprise us. For the ...”

“... one for a British, the other for an American magazine. Through Pound, Frost also met Yeats, who is said to have praised his new work (‘the best poetry written in America for a long time’). Frost soon became friendly with the Georgian poets, Lascelles Abercrombie, W.H. Davies and Wilfrid Gibson, and he formed a truly close friendship, probably the closest ...”

“... place. It was at the Gare du Nord in Paris, just after Easter 1895, that Ada, his cousin’s wife, said to him: ‘You are just the person to write. Why don’t you?’ Later in the year they became lovers, though a decade was to pass before she obtained a divorce and they could marry: it is not clear whether Galsworthy could not bear to break his father’s ...”

“... lady, an art-world insider, a Proust fanatic and a New Woman. At her funeral, Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation.’ But she was also great fun. When she finished a painting, she gave it a tea party, inviting a (carefully curated) collection of guests.Writing about Stettheimer in 1980, Linda Nochlin ...”

“... and ambition David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both offer a strident critique of Western civilisation. For Said, the West’s representation of the Orient is an ideological distortion in the service of Western imperialism. The Oriental is ...”

“... their enchantment. Total immersion was Rothko’s intention. ‘They are not pictures,’ he said of his murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. ‘I have made a place.’ He aimed to make such places in a dining room at Harvard and in the octagonal Rothko Chapel in Houston; few artists have been more obsessive, more imperious, more obnoxious ...”

“... Ethiopians, subject to an international arms embargo, had camels and little else: they were, Steer said, still living in the ‘spear age’. (His spirited book about the invasion, Caesar in Abyssinia, was written as a testament to ‘the strength and spirit of the Ethiopian armies against a European great power’.) The war which finally began in October 1935 ...”

“... have been many good biographies of Khrushchev, the best of them Mark Frankland’s 1967 study and Edward Crankshaw’s Khrushchev: A Career (1966). Taubman refers to Crankshaw’s opinions rather seldom and then warily, as if uneasy about possible comparisons. But there is no fair comparison to be made. Crankshaw wrote while the Cold War still ...”

“... firebrand Edmund Ek’. ‘What tiresome and laborious folly it is to write empty tomes,’ Borges said, ‘to expound in five hundred pages on an idea that one could easily propound orally in a few minutes. Better is pretending that the books exist already and offering a summary or commentary.’ Something like this occurs in Flann O’Brien’s The Third ...”

“... and Professions in Gujarat’, and looked back on his earlier collaboration with the likes of Edward Moor in exposing such practices as female infanticide, which he claimed was particularly common among the Jadeja Rajputs of Gujarat. Walker, like many others, was inclined increasingly as his career progressed to see Indian society as made up not of ...”

“... may be legally poured out, dissected and analysed, with effects on the owner to be determined. Edward Snowden made these discoveries, among others, while working as an analyst for the CIA, the NSA and the security outfit Booz Allen Hamilton (whose present vice chairman, Mike McConnell, is a former director of the NSA). Imperialism has been defined as doing ...”