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“... Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest daughter from her governor’s home in Warwickshire. Elizabeth would be placed on the English throne as a puppet sovereign, to be betrothed to a French or Spanish royal suitor and facilitate ...”

“... down the boundaries between art and life. The first Shadows, which no longer exists, seemed to William Pechter ‘closer at times to being that elusive entity, a true slice of life, than almost anything else I can think of which claims the name. There is, in effect, no beginning or end to the film – just middle.’ But Pechter found that ‘this quality ...”

“... Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales though, and most of the ships that sailed to the Arctic from Europe in the 17th century were whalers, heading ever further ...”

“... English, in an anthology called Pegasus Descending, ‘a book of the best bad verse’, which, as James Wright put it, contained ‘nothing mediocre!’ To read abysmal poems is often hilarious, but there’s an element of idealism mixed into the hilarity: reading the worst poems is a way of feeling, albeit negatively, that echo of poetic possibility. Think ...”

“... a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist ...”

“... Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author of the famous and equally sharp judgment on Balfour’s great Liberal ...”

“... maiden name was Kweksylber (‘quicksilver’). He was at various times Joe Liss, Joe Eligmann, James Smith, Joseph Schmidt, Charlie Silver, Charles Greenbaum, Abraham Ramer, Ludwig; these are just a few of his ghost-names. Silver had indeed been in New York City in the early 1890s, a low-grade thief, thug, jailbird and police informer. Convicted of ...”

“... Orwell’s political prose to the kind of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the novels of Henry James. John Sutherland has been reading and rereading Orwell ever since the 1954 BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four alerted him to the novel’s existence. So he feels under no constraint either to bless or to damn a writer whose ...”

“... and destabilising contribution to late Elizabethan politics of a succession of Catholic writers, William Allen and Robert Parsons (or Persons) among them, who were bent on destroying or discrediting the regime, or securing a successor to Elizabeth who would reintroduce or at least tolerate their religion. Lake is not impressed by the recent claim that ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”

“... into art – think of the lush bits of cited advertisements in paintings by Richard Hamilton or James Rosenquist – and the two-way traffic has continued ever since. Then, too, there is the notion of the artist as showman. Art-world impresarios existed before Surrealism – Marinetti qualifies, as does Tzara, not to mention, say, Courbet – but Dalí took ...”

“... of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me immediately who he was. He was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“...  Henry James​ ’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... scattered stars fall like the ruined typesetting of a printer into one tangled mass’. Professor William Thomson had explained it all. God, however, was eternal, and through Him we would – or could – partake in His immortality. The nibs of our pens might rust the ink might fade, and the paper might perish. More seriously, perhaps, what we had written ...”