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“... York as part of Walter Arensberg’s circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia, Varèse, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. She sketched Freud in Vienna and lived among the avant garde in postwar Berlin. In the Twenties, when American expatriates flocked to Paris, Loy was there too. In accounts of those years, Loy’s charm and wit are emphasised, and her ...”

“... and BBC contemporaries included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by ...”

“... playing on mental associations, the villains deploy skills that resemble those of Collins himself. William Wilkie Collins was born in 1824, with a large, deformed head and tiny feet, to a governess who had wanted to be an actress and a painter whose pursuit of wealthy sitters had turned him into something of a snob. The actor ...”

“... The schoolmaster William Johnson is remembered for three things, although not under that name. He wrote the most famous of all translations from Greek lyric verse, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust ...”

“... We all​ judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought ...”

“... says ‘he entertained a culte for the literature that is now called “ninetyish” – Pater, Wilde and Dowson.’ Almost as soon as a decade became a label, there were people who did not wish to have it stuck to them – Arthur Machen, the magus of the fantastic, although a paid-up member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, insisted to the end of his days ...”

“... featuring such plays as Mrs Warren’s Profession (Shaw, 1894), The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1895), and various selections from Shakespeare’s oeuvre, including the late romances. Blue knows the theory, but gets no practice. When her father agrees to settle in Stockton, North Carolina, for her senior year, she finally gets an opportunity to use ...”

“... it featured comic clerics), the satire ceased to offend – which meant, as the Victorian critic William Archer pointed out, that it ceased to be satire. In fact, it was a sort of apotheosis. Gilbert’s caricatures made W.H. Smith, Sir Garnet Wolseley and Oscar Wilde popular celebrities. Wolseley was so tickled by being ...”

“... face on the narrow green sofa. The expression is childlike: ‘It was the look he recorded in William Dorrit’s face in death; it was the look which he saw in the faces of the corpses on view in the Paris Morgue. This connection between death and infancy is one that had haunted him; sleep, repose, death, infancy, innocence, oblivion are the words that ...”

“... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with ...”

“... Canal shares) and the transformer of English queens into empresses of India. Peel, reincarnated as William Gladstone, denounces him from beyond the grave. Gladstone sweeps to victory, Byron is toppled and Peel is avenged. Byron dies, leaving posterity perplexed. Had he been a writer who happened to become prime minister, or a prime minister who happened to be ...”

“... to be publicly named.’ (As a cub reporter in Pittsburgh in the 1890s, Cather had covered the Wilde debacle – with horrified revulsion.) She loved in secret, but love she did, and like a hidden flame, her surreptitious devotion to members of her own sex both animated and refined her art. However turgid, O’Brien’s psychosexual portrait of Cather was ...”

“... Only Place for Sex.’ After Paul’s arrival in Germany, this is confirmed by his second mentor William Bradshaw (Isherwood): ‘Everybody in Berlin is equal ... It all comes down to sex.’ Sexuality, in this view, is an egalitarian force. ‘Nakedness is the democracy of the new Germany,’ Paul reflects after he has been taken to the open-air swimming ...”

“... executed as were untold thousands of Irish rebels), and in Autobiographies he remembers how Oscar Wilde once remarked to him: ‘we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’ In one of his open letters to United Ireland he warns that a nation can become ‘thoroughly stupified by oratory’, and here Yeats the ...”

“... are occluded. The major sex scandals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries involving Parnell, Wilde and Casement are all treated as if they took their meaning primarily in a context of British repression and misrepresentation. Although the Kincora scandal makes a brief appearance for similar reasons, there is nothing about the divorce and abortion ...”