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“... about Bathsua Makin, a noted 17th-century polyglot, says she was presented at the court of James I because of her ability to ‘speak and write pure Latin, Greek and Hebrew’. ‘But can she spin?’ the king asked. John Gallagher relates this story and many like it in Learning Languages in Early Modern England, in which he assembles a rich body of ...”

“... their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases ...”

“... unfairly shown. But there is no mention of Peterley or Pennington in Nicolson’s diaries or in James Lees-Milne’s two-volume biography of Nicolson. There is no mention of them, or of this book, anywhere. They do not appear in the biography of Arthur Machen by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, though Peterley Harvest ...”

“... performer and avant-gardist, one of the first women to make her mark as a conceptual artist. William Burroughs is usually mentioned as the single most important influence on Acker’s writing, but, although he plainly was extremely important to her, the context in which she read Burroughs had already been set by the cultural formation that she had ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... travelled to Taipei and helped draft the league’s agenda; at the league’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the keynote address. And then there was John Singlaub, a retired general and another of the league’s main organisers, who thought the US government had fumbled the urban counter-insurgency against the Black Panthers and other radical ...”

“... about being an ill-educated ‘peasant’. Nevertheless he seized on Heraclitus, Hopkins and James Joyce in particular in his one year as a student and developed demanding tastes in music, literature and art. Graham became a farm-labourer in Galway, travelled with a fair and worked on the docks in Dublin to avoid conscription in 1939, but failed his Army ...”

“... a brilliant machine for the generation of property rights. Security of title was crucial. As Sir William Petty, that ingenious pioneer of statistics who himself acquired huge estates in Ireland, pointed out, ‘there can be no incouragement to industry, where there is no assurance of what shall be gotten by it.’ Jefferson was the Founding Father most ...”

“... population, and in which death would be, if not eliminated, at least indefinitely postponed. William Godwin pointed to the enormous agricultural capacity of the world’s yet unexploited land: mind would triumph over matter, and ‘there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment.’ It was better that there should be more people rather ...”

“... 1534, when her sister threw her out of the court after her secret marriage to a Mr Nobody called William Stafford. Grumble all you like about the feminisation of history, at Henry’s court you can’t avoid it; the politics of sex and procreation dominate, so chatter of caudles and possets and babies’ caps drowns out the masculine drone of tunnage and ...”

“... Richier among them. The second, more positive category included Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by ...”

“... Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who hung out with New Yorker writers and married one of them; a big personality piece about an Italian carter named Joe Cantalupo who was a fixture of the ...”

“... amatory adventures in stuffy aristocratic households. Like and unlike a foreshadowing of Henry James’s The Awkward Age, ‘Lady Susan’ perhaps startles most by the fact that it doesn’t seem, with all its marvellous originality, quite to come off; it leaves a reader cold. And it does so, because the story is cold. Where Henry ...”

“... moles. This seems to me wrong-headed in several different ways. The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy ...”

“... business as a Maltese cat’.Mabel now concentrated on their publicity strategy. She contacted William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who agreed to write a piece on Dickinson. Of all the reviewers of the 1890 volume, Howells was the most intuitive:Occasionally, the outside of the poem, so to speak, is left so rough, so rude, that the art ...”