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“... strange one and necessarily full of contradictions, of which her uncompromising zeal for self-exploitation is one. Madame Colette, though never quite Madame Colette de l’Académie Française – one game she couldn’t crack – was accorded a state funeral by the French government: this was the woman who was dismissed by her second husband’s ...”

“... and has defined his political ideal in ‘a celebrated study of the Utopian Socialists from Robert Owen to William Morris’. Marquis is also, it emerges, a dirty-minded lecher who betrays his disciple Richard sexually and intellectually before being carried off raving to the lunatic asylum. He returns at the end of the novel to lead the fight against ...”

“... the voice in which his poems spoke, already had a tinge of bardic anonymity, a suggestion that the self had indeed been humbled, but momentously: Seamus Heaney the man was being elected, so it seemed to him, into the role of Seamus Heaney, poet. If this makes him sound like George Barker, it absolutely shouldn’t. What is attractive about Heaney’s response ...”

“... At the same time he was obsessed with the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those individuals – a recognised genus – who seem to have been sent into the world to be talked about. Such persons satisfy a basic human need. Connolly’s ...”

“... Blake and Shelley both drew a firm line at other practices: Blake at masturbation (‘The self enjoyings of self denial’), and Shelley at homosexuality (he was incredulous that the ‘operose’ act of sodomy should have been performed by the Greeks). Shelley is famous for having written that ‘chastity is a ...”

“... as ever, are plain enough. After 1912, without compromising his identity as a solitary tramper and self-communer, he developed a circle of new friends who helped him to make the most of his personality rather than sorrowfully submitting to the miseries it produced. With Clifford Bax he rediscovered some of his undergraduate jauntiness; in Eleanor Farjeon he ...”

“... Hearst’s general antipathy to it, so did contemporary music, in Promenade seasons programmed by Robert Ponsonby and in the regular Music in Our Time series produced by Stephen Plaistow. Jointly, they commissioned a string of masterpieces. To my memory it all seems a golden age; an age of golden voices, too, of announcers whose soothingly impersonal ...”

“... speculating about the nature of society as making positive suggestions for its improvement. The self-contradictions and simultaneous embracing of conflicting viewpoints that served him so well in other fields were not what was wanted here. Anyone whose acquaintance with him was confined to the material made available to us in Mason and Wokler’s Political ...”

“... recently that his island-state had ‘unwritten its own history’ in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about origins’. Tasmania’s origins lay in an act of genocidal conquest and a penal experiment, both of which were so recent and so omnipresent in their effect as to make recollection intolerable. There are certainly striking ...”

“... against the housing market at its height. They make good characters themselves: Kahneman – self-effacing, insecure and moody (‘like Woody Allen,’ as one colleague put it, ‘without the humour’) – grew up in Vichy France, in hiding. His father, a chemist, had been saved from deportation to a concentration camp by the intervention of his ...”

“... vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders. Eventually, he all but scratched his family from the record – especially his curious father, a military horse painter turned landscapist whose later years ...”

“... Without being timid about his own artistic worth, he largely resisted the normal mechanisms of self-promotion. He turned down the Légion d’Honneur (while accepting foreign honours with no cachet in Paris), refused to have anything to do with musical cliques, detested deference or homage, and was so secretive (if that’s the right word for simply not ...”

“... without noticing it. The first European to discover the Mississippi from the sea was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was assisted by local Indian guides in 1682. On a riverbank several days upstream La Salle shouted ‘Vive le Roi!’ and claimed the Mississippi Basin for Louis XIV. He named the vast territory, amounting to a third of the ...”

“... the accused has ever admitted to any specific acts, though Jake Prescott wrote to one bomb victim, Robert Carr, apologising for the attack on him (an apology graciously accepted), and John Barker has stated that ‘the police framed a guilty man.’ The convicted Anna Mendelson publishes poetry under another name and the acquitted Angela Weir became the ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”