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“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... in which the leading Whig magnates have been portrayed as industrious, responsible, widely-read statesmen working to a serious reform agenda. Even before Gladstone had committed himself to the Liberal Party – or so many historians now believe – the Whig-dominated Ministries of the mid-Victorian period were pursuing authentically Liberal ...”

“... from the English Faculty Library at Cambridge. It would fall due and I would renew it. I must have read it quite literally hundreds of times – and everyone else not at all! ‘No one shaved, and only the turtle washed,’ as Lowell said of the turtle in the bathtub. I discovered Hamilton, I suppose, and should explain, in the place of honour at the end of ...”

“... the headstone was still blank. He ‘gave the fellow eighteeen pence’ to cut an inscription. It read simply: ‘O Rare Benn Jonson’. Like the portraitist, Jonson’s biographer has to achieve a kind of dual image. He has to convey Jonson’s huge stature, his pre-eminence as a public literary figure, yet also to reveal something of the private flaws and ...”

“... How many people in fact found Britain’s mainland colonies a land of opportunity? The late Richard Hofstadter suggested that the answer would almost certainly not sustain the success myth. In America at 1750: A Social Portrait, a wonderfully sensitive piece of writing, he observed that the servants as well as the slaves had been commodities, goods sold ...”

“... fat sheep, three barrels of beer, and six dozen of bread’. The hero of death is the hefty Richard Dawson of Malpas in Cheshire, who died of the plague in 1625. He knew that he was too heavy for his nephew and a servant-girl to bury, so he dug his own grave and climbed in to die. Birth, Marriage and Death is packed with such tales. It has 20 ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... war promised to bring campaigns to an end more quickly and decisively. His articles and books were read with interest but little engagement by most of his compatriots. The British Army between the wars was small potatoes compared to the Navy, and a lot less exciting than the RAF; in any case, all the Armed Services were on short commons until the late ...”

“... evidence, and that misinterpreted. It is certainly difficult to see how anyone who has actually read Buchan, Sapper and Yates can yoke the first with the other two. For the difference in flavour – between decency and indecency – compare these three bouts between hero and foreigner. Hannay v. Colonel von Stumm in Greenmantle: He half tripped over a ...”

“... hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from Eleusis, and now Alexander’s manageably-sized study of the whole corpus of the poetry, and Woodward’s of The Pisan Cantos. My feeling is that Pound’s stock is rising, and that one reason for ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... classifies as immediately obvious. A truth-condition theorist should not say that one can simply read off the correct substantive account of understanding a particular expression from its truth-theoretic clause. His position should rather be that the correct substantive account – an account of what Harman would call its conceptual role – determines its ...”

“... It was a rather dotty piece of satirical Science Fiction (so Green says – I confess I haven’t read it), in which some invaders from the Fourth Dimension (identifiable with Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb and Milner) conspire with the Duc de Mersch (King Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur ...”

“... in the celebrity-packed audience: hands up, she said with customary cruel glee, anyone who has read one of his novels. Bragg, though, had the last laugh with the success of The Maid of Buttermere (1987), a bold and animated retelling of a 19th-century scandal involving the imposter Hatfield. Then, in a neat career reversal, the stir provoked by A Time to ...”

“... out for undercover police. If they ever leave the neighbourhood, or go to the movies, or even read a book, we don’t hear about it. What they mostly do is hang out in the crack house and in their apartments, drinking, using what seem to be enormous amounts of drugs, and, with the prodding of Bourgois, talking – and talking – about themselves and ...”