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“... the plot during a restless night in Tokyo, when he was visited by a shimmering vision of Gertrude Lawrence). Four days to write a classic comedy was good going, but he had already written Hay Fever in three. In 1941, when hard up, he withdrew to the Italianate folly of Portmeirion in Wales (presumably festooned in barbed wire) and knocked out Blithe Spirit in ...”

“... money – arrogantly refuses to serve. The Hand of the Arch-Sinner, lovingly reconstructed by Robert Collins from Branwell’s preternaturally minute handwriting, contains two of the Percy stories, ‘The Life of Northangerland’ and ‘Real Life in Verdopolis’. (‘Northangerland’ is Percy’s aristocratic title, but also an apt term for Brontë ...”

“... Something is amiss with Robert Harbison’s sentences. They seem to consist almost wholly of last-minute additions. The way out of the impasse brought on by the decay of religion available to Wilson was an authorised version of Ruskin’s symbolic correspondence, authorised by duplicated evidence from the distant past excavated by science, and institutionalised by the artist in specific forms, like the Brighton chalice, also a calyx, a flower on its stem, attempting to work a magic which would inhere in a thing not just in one’s method for contemplating it ...”

“... in 1926, and now brought out in a third edition, completely rewritten by the lexicographer Robert Burchfield. We can take Ludovic’s reliance on Fowler as the synecdoche for a whole tradition; over the last seventy years, Fowler has been the place of first and last resort for English grammatical disputes. Perhaps a chief reason for the success of ...”

“... painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert Shirley in Persia and is shown draped in a kind of tent of gold fabric – the effect of her clothes is splendidly exotic. Her thin-lipped, quizzical half-smile is less contrived than those of many of the court beauties. Clothes like hers offer a break ...”

“... involved with the area. When George Bernard Shaw, who lived in the nearby village of Ayot St Lawrence, needed a garage, he asked Parker (his revolving writing hut was Shaw’s own work).Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead followed Letchworth and Welwyn in the first wave of postwar new towns. Few realise that Hatfield was another, a town extension planned and ...”

“... their lives. In his literary notebook, he copied out sentences from G.K. Chesterton’s book about Robert Browning, published in 1903. Chesterton had written about ‘the terrible importance of detail’ that apparently possessed Browning in an almost demonic way: Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes & mouths gaping with a story ...”

“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... situation, and what is the role of the British nuclear arsenal? The latter question is analysed in Lawrence Freedman’s serious and thought-provoking book, Britain and Nuclear Weapons. To the first question, why Britain should have nuclear weapons, he cannot discover any very clear answer. The arguments have changed over the years, but the policy of keeping ...”

“... immortalised on the screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, mortalised by Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in ...”

“... the people. It’s in the poems. The October day I stopped for lunch I found her reading some of Lawrence’s letters, which she compares with Keats’s. Miss Niedecker lives in terms of the communications from Zukofsky and a few others. Besides her writing and her extensive reading, she works at the local hospital for support. She is a frail person, like ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... catalogue. From 1907, many of the Country Life articles on Lutyens’s houses were written by Lawrence Weaver, and combined carefully-composed illustrations with a sympathetic, uncritical text that displayed Lutyens’s work before a wide and interested audience. These essays formed the basis of Weaver’s book on Lutyens houses and gardens, first ...”

“... calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading Rose, on ...”

“... artist, to develop rather than possess innately). While Schuyler and his circle tolerated Auden, Robert Lowell and his reputation gave them fits. Schuyler would define his poetic project, at least in part, by opposing it to that of Lowell and the other gloomy campus darlings of the New Critics: New York poets, except I suppose the colour-blind, are affected ...”