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“... to have its volume revised and expanded by Yale.* The mid-18th-century country house designed by James Paine is described as ‘utilitarian’ but ‘counterbalanced with magnificent and ornate interiors’. It belonged to the Lamb family, forebears of Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, Lord Melbourne and was bought ...”

“... roses purr beneath polystyrene skies. It is (and rightly) no longer the done thing to sneer at Lord Leighton and Rossetti. (I reserve the right to snort occasionally.) But the case is complicated. There was always an impatience, a sense of insufficiency, haunting the Aesthetic Movement from within. Henry James coming out ...”

“... cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a ...”

“... subjects. If mystics can do so much with repetition and the word and, then why can’t we? William James speaks of that ‘vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism’. Some people can do cartwheels and other people have to do that thing where they put down their hands and then kind of hop off the ground. This feels more like the latter. When ...”

“... For M.R. James it is Eton and King’s that are gardens – incomparable gardens which are, however, precisely made for thus exclaiming about as one sits in their created shade. With the exclamation itself nobody need quarrel. It is as applicable to the material fabric as to much in the life and spirit of these magnificent royal foundations ...”

“... nature was also the careerist who desperately sought public office, working his way up to become James I’s lord chancellor, only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set ...”

“... the way in which he strings an exotic sketch of a minor character along a rope of exile. Stein in Lord Jim, for instance, with his collections of butterflies and ‘catacombs of beetles’, is said to have taken part in the revolutions of 1848, then fled to Trieste, and then to Tripoli, ‘with a stock of cheap watches to hawk about’. Bezmozgis is similarly ...”

“... and while Griffiths’s identification of the other three figures as John Gerard, his patron Lord Burghley and his collaborator the Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens seems plausible enough, a tissue of improbable conjecture is required to place a mere playwright and actor alongside Elizabeth’s lord treasurer on the ...”

“... all the burthens’ and ‘they are known as neighbours’; the unbearably pompous and long-winded Lord Chancellor Brougham; the self-pitying Lord Althorp; and Lord Durham, who, Pearce guesses, had ‘read his Shelley’, though in 1832 pretty well no one, let alone a Whig earl, had read ...”

“... The Peer and the Peri was performed for the first time at the Savoy Theatre. In Act II, a restless Lord Chancellor, troubled by lovesickness rather than the expense of his furnishings, cannot sleep. As he wanders through his lodgings, he sings the famous ‘Nightmare Song’. One of the elements of the nightmare is what would now be called a venture capital ...”

“... stories, Auerbach concedes, have not always been explicitly feminist. As early as the tales of Lord Byron and Dr Polidori (since Auerbach’s folklore sources are limited, this is where the vampire genealogy begins) the figure of the vampire ‘offered an intimacy, a homoerotic sharing, that threatened the hierarchical distance of sanctioned ...”

“... Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable as these ...”

“... policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert Rhodes James, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of Eden’s periods as Foreign Secretary: he claims that his Suez policy was absolutely justified and only wrecked by wrong-headed and pusillanimous Americans. The differing attitudes of the two ...”

“... withering issue, number 45. The new prime minister, George Grenville, and his secretary of state, Lord Halifax, decided it was time to put a stop to this constant assault on government policy. Advised by the Treasury solicitor that number 45 constituted a seditious libel, Halifax signed a warrant authorising the King’s Messengers to arrest – without ...”

“... down-in-the-mouth father depends on tall tales to keep in with the better players. The father, James Price, is a cautious, trustworthy accountant working in a small town in Delaware, but the lies he tells when it comes to his golf handicap are brazen. For Price, a round of golf will always be a losing battle of muffed drives and stifled putts, yet his ...”