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“... had arrived. They were considering which hospital to take him to: he would be going to the Charing Cross Hospital on Fulham Palace Road. There had always been many problems with my father’s health; he had a bad heart, a consequence of the rheumatic disease he had as a child; he suffered from atrial fibrillation, he had one kidney, he had high blood ...”

“... Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of ...”

“... has come under the notice of fairly ambitious critics, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Quentin Bell and Anthony Powell. There is very little published comment on Surtees from his own day, but what there is tends to be emphatic about his fidelity to life. ‘The account of the medical worthies who first made the Handley waters famous,’ said Lockhart, reviewing ...”

“... This year​  marks the sixtieth anniversary of Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, which gave a pioneering analysis of the ‘anonymous institutions’ that seemed to be running the country, and the relations between them. It was the most famous of several books published in the early 1960s exploring the idea of a British ‘Establishment’, as part of a discussion about failure in economic and social life ...”

“... of 19 massive figures carved out of wood and arranged like a Latin American Stations of the Cross around the glaringly spotlit figure of a naked man bound and hooded for execution. The statues are larger than life-size, with eerie, enlarged, polished onyx eyes and small teeth (real ones). You could walk among the statues, become part of the scene, one ...”

“... breaking through the clouds of civil strife, recalled a moment of epiphany at Mortimer’s Cross, one of the battles Edward fought on his way to the throne. A trick of the early morning light had created the illusion of three suns rising simultaneously in the sky. Edward proved equal to the moment, glossing this disturbing portent to his troops as a ...”

“... hybrid, the ‘ruling class’, so familiar that we forget how brief its existence was. A cross between a gentrified bourgeoisie and a professionalised aristocracy, it ranked as ‘upper-middle’ in the hierarchy of class. Mismanagement of the Crimean War in the 1850s provoked a crisis of confidence in the nation’s leadership, compelling the landed ...”

“... in 1963, jostle Ghanaian proverbs collected by Schipper from Peggy Appiah and her son Kwame Anthony Appiah; Persian mottoes are lined up beside Brazilian, Finnish, Irish and Creole ones, as well as numerous examples from different African regions and groupings. Schipper stoutly defends her method: ‘Mutual knowledge is an important key to peaceful ...”

“... making a career around Larkin is that the output is quite small, and others, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite, have already picked the meat out of the life. What’s left after a couple of books of literary criticism wouldn’t amount to a serious life’s work for a mayfly. Or shouldn’t. There is, however, an unmistakable reverential quality in the ...”

“... but I rather suspected that John had meant for the note to raise a smile. We would often cross paths at literary events, and he was always ready with the smiling inquiry about his old paper: ‘How are you all getting on?’ David Horspool I did not know John well personally but I did know him as an editor of great distinction. He brought out the ...”

“... A number of journalists have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and ...”

“... are Mozart and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the French sandwich of Arletty and Yvonne Arnaud contains Anthony Armstrong-Jones. The name of Neville Chamberlain seems to set off a nervous chain-reaction of theatricality, for he is noisily succeeded by Gower Champion, Coco Chanel, Carol Channing, ‘Chips’ Channon (by no means out of place), and Charlie ...”

“... and who recognised what was best in himself only for long enough to write it down and then cross it out. There is some truth in some of this, but not much. Tasso’s poem is a Christian epic, and it is both Christian and epic in ways that make life particularly difficult for itself. It does not proceed on the assumption that worship of a Christian god ...”

“... simple-minded or single-minded. Narrative can be capacious as well as directional. Burrow and Anthony Grafton are as capacious as can be. Their question is not so much ‘how did it come to this?’ – in Grafton’s case, to a more critical historicism in the 17th and 18th centuries; in Burrow’s, to professional history-writing in the 20th – as ...”

“... Revealed) and maps (Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel). Book history doesn’t just cross disciplines, it mixes media. But it would be unfair to ask one volume to circumscribe what’s not really a ‘field’ so much as a junction. Pity the scholar torn (in Robert Darnton’s words) between ‘collating editions, compiling statistics, decoding ...”