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“... Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at breakfast, but Agnes Lewis had no doubts. In 1894 the rescued document created much excitement, not least because it seemed to show Joseph as the natural father of Jesus. Agnes tried to explain this away, but was not too embarrassed; like her sister, Maggie Gibson, she was enjoying ...”

“... a rolling-pin. The best succeed by subverting and ostentatiously coarsening the form, as Wyndham Lewis did: So there you have (in this political age) The secret of the dishonour of the sage – The one that’s young enough to have some teeth The one that’s suspected honest underneath. Lewis’s own teeth were all on ...”

“... Conference. Major remains insistent that Back to Basics did not amount to a moral crusade. It was Peter Lilley and John Redwood, his hard-right opponents in the Conservative Party, who revisited the issues of single mothers and sexual continence. Nevertheless, Major admits in his autobiography that Back to Basics was devised as a challenge to entrenched ...”

“... and statues. Then I left Bournemouth to go to university, and I got to know London, and I read Peter Conrad’s The Victorian Treasure-House and, belatedly, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, with its glimpses of the nouveau riche glamour Bournemouth (a.k.a. Sandbourne) had briefly enjoyed before settling down to become the place I knew only as an embarrassing ...”

“... health days, days to think about alternative careers or wonder that Edinburgh’s principal, Peter Mathieson, has a pay package of more than £400,000 yet has insisted that UCU pension demands are unaffordable. The lengths to which management will go to get round the marking boycott border on the absurd. I don’t believe students will be content to ...”

“... and droll charm into a famously smart set. He spent Betjemann’s money, loathed his tutor, C.S. Lewis: ‘What’s wrong with you, Betjeman, is that you’ve no starl. No sense of starl.’ He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony ...”

“... steady, well-connected, a pillar of Moat County society. The brothers’ problems recall those of Peter Flood, the protagonist of Brotherly Love (1992), this novel’s immediate and much-praised predecessor. Peter, like Ward, is a masochist (in addition to boxing, a Dexter passion, he likes jumping off rooftops), with an ...”

“... the full Yale treatment. ‘Almost’, because Brooke is a more abstemious editor than W.S. Lewis and the team responsible for the Yale edition of Walpole’s Correspondence: indeed, he makes the specific assumption that ‘the student of these volumes will have [that edition] readily available.’ Student, not reader, mark you: and we are told also ...”

“... outside the restriction of their lives and are lost to themselves. Slouching towards Kalamazoo by Peter De Vries, is about sexual liberation and the 19th century’s heritage: its first half jokily replays the situation of The Scarlet Letter in a small Mid-Western town in the late 1950s. The narrator is Tony Thrasher, the precociously witty and allusive son ...”

“... often exquisite background glimpsed through an arch. I am with Ma Cleghom, the old landlady in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite, who was so disappointed by her sight of the afterlife: And she pushed him [St Peter] aside and took a keek in, and there was God – with a plague in one hand and a war and a thunderbolt ...”

“... Museum of Ireland’s permanent display in Dublin, in the pages of many books and articles. (Peter Adam’s Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work, revised in 2009, remains the best introduction.) But despite the photographs and exhibitions and the commercial as well as scholarly rediscovery of her work in recent decades, I cannot quite shake the suspicion that ...”

“... is a sore head or a streaky patch on a window. Find the remedy, and it’s gone. Limbo dancing, Peter Hain’s sideburns, the Angry Brigade, King Crimson: these films are always so good on perky period souvenirs, so skilled at avoiding most emotions apart from the fake ones. Though actually, I wasn’t impressed by the period detail in Misbehaviour ...”

“... America, go out for a sail in Wally’s 26-foot pontoon and the boat starts sinking, the Rev. J. Peter Larson tells Pastor Ingqvist: ‘Dave, I don’t have the answers, but I think that all of us will come out of this with a feeling of unity of concern.’ Keillor is very good at catching the contrast between the Wobegonians’ unflinching resistance to ...”

“... to follow. The same could not be said of Penrose and Courtiour’s The Pencourt File (1978) or Peter Chippindale and David Leigh’s The Thorpe Committal (1979), the latter being straightforward court reporting of the Minehead committal proceedings. The authors do not waste much time on the South African connection, though it seems clear that in 1974-5 ...”

“... with the Americas, while the latter range from Francesco Colonna’s The Dream of Poliphilo to Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno stories, taking in works by Michelangelo, Col-eridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others. It is a short book, but dense. Warner’s highly complex line of argument, winding around so much material, and so ...”