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“... for the country remained his line. He was not much of a joiner. He did sign up with the ‘self-consciously elitist’ and purportedly non-political Anglo-German Fellowship in 1935, but, Kershaw writes, he was not one of its more active members. He had no connection with any of the pro-German groupuscules fired by rabid anti-semitism or inspired by ...”

“... foundations of institutional philanthropy. But no less important was her extraordinary gift for self-dramatisation and storytelling, the capacity to imagine and live her own life as an epic. Like other eminent Victorians, More inspired a loathing in later generations more or less proportional to the veneration she received from her own. Stott acknowledges ...”

“... be absolutely strict and pure.’ Nowhere is this paradoxical combination of uncontrolled rage and self-conscious formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed by Nigel Finch for Arena Films. It is in fact a collaborative performance piece staged by Bourgeois and the director which successfully enacts the ...”

“... on the island and three-quarters of its adult males were or had been convicts.) Thanks largely to Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore (1987), Tasmania is thought of as a convict hell: a place of ferocious floggings and inhuman confinement. So it would become, but only after the transformations in its economy and polity deliberately effected by that second wave of ...”

“... of the Home Rule party, were the Fenians, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the self-appointed guardians of the separatist, republican tradition. Very much in a minority, Fenianism was nevertheless a crucial presence in Irish nationalism, representing ideals that few constitutional politicians could afford openly to ignore. Irish MPs paid ...”

“... was supposedly un-American in its embrace of Third World Marxism, its call for armed black self-defence, its celebration of a separate, distinctive black culture, and its call for ‘offing the pigs’ and overthrowing white supremacist ‘AmeriKKKa’. In this version of civil rights history, angry black militants alienated the very whites who they ...”

“... might well have regarded with disdain. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, the self-consciously classical narrative poems he published in 1593 and 1594, with their dutifully obsequious dedications to Southampton, were what mattered to him, rather than Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and the early history plays, which he made no ...”

“... and replied: ‘Go on with you! Scat!’ This image of a person obscurely in the know, at once self-collected and reticent, is also an image of the person Bishop became – or the one many took her to be. But Bishop knew that you could compel attention by declining to demand it, and that restraint could be a kind of plea. She once wrote of a friend: ‘She ...”

“... sunset was never exactly a paragon of family values. A boy in the 1950s, the heyday of the genre, Robert Pippin grew up steeped in the Western. He watched them both on television (his favourite show was Have Gun, Will Travel) and ‘all day Saturdays at the movies (ten in the morning until six at night) … one Western after another’. Growing up in Havana ...”

“... we will not be hearing much about ‘merely good chaps, or fairly good chaps’, nor about ‘self-restrained’ chaps, or ‘secretive’ chaps. And fair enough, we have to say: these are his memoirs, after all. But what then is left to tell? Luckily, Amis possesses a good memory for anecdotes, or so he says, and he is also not too choosy when it comes ...”

“... exactly a lost classic, as it is billed, since it was published in 1928, and again, in a slightly self-censored version, in 1968 – says he asked William Burroughs what he thought. ‘It’s the book that made me want to be a writer,’ Burroughs said. But was it poetry? ‘Of course it’s poetry. It rhymes.’ It is ‘closer to “Frankie and ...”

“... want you to be. For women, not only women of the Third World, this is the most available form of self-preservation. The temporal form of the book is as intricately logical as electric wiring, moving not serially but in bundled threads between the area of darkness of the East and the often artificial light of America. From the electrical storm of ‘high ...”

“... No, what scotched the Disraelian legend as serious history was the standard biography by Robert Blake in 1966. Lord Blake possesses unimpeachable credentials as the eminent chronicler of the evolution of the Conservative Party. But he maintains also irreproachable standards as an academic historian, and these made his Disraeli disconcerting reading ...”

“... Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of Berjeman, Waugh and the Sitwells, defined in Lucas’s account as Bright Young Things, was, in ...”

“... of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves’. He believes that the proper method for historians today is the same as it has always been, at least since the 19th century, when the rules of ...”