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“... new dispensation? Cannadine’s assumption that one can re-create the wider general audience that read G.M. Trevelyan or the old Pelican History simply by trying harder is reminiscent of Norman Tebbit on the unemployed or Mrs Shephard on state education – wishful thinking (and ahistorical). Revealingly, the old Pelican series, which Cannadine himself ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”

“... acute and literate observers of the American past and present, and this volume is a delightful read, often very funny, sharply thoughtful and analytical, always telling: it will have a deservedly large success. (I hope, though, that Wills changes his publishers. I wouldn’t stay with someone who fulfils a classic author’s nightmare by getting his name ...”

“... the 1980s by a touch of incestuous and homo-erotic feeling. Writing in the New Republic in 1979, Richard Hall faulted the five-volume biography for manifesting ‘a peculiar timidity at the centre of the work’. What was missing from Edel’s account, according to Hall, was not so much James’s ‘homo-erotic bent’ – Edel had, after all, speculated in ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... in England there was but one fount of honour, Elizabeth Tudor. Sidney’s virtues might have been read out of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. They included good looks, an excellent mind (or ‘wit’), and a propensity for impulsive action which frequently alarmed those who believed that they were in charge of him. It was easy to fall under his ...”

“... that it is difficult indeed to avoid excoriating him in the strongest of terms. It is hard to read these remarks by the heads of the two main Western governments which had been fighting in Korea for three years as suggesting anything other than that they thought supporting Rhee had been rather a mistake. But was Rhee himself the problem? Was it his ...”

“... distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?’ The old philosophers thought not, but Richard Gregory and subsequent workers have told more complex stories about recovery from blindness. We do not need philosophers to become engrossed. The one non-spiritual goal of Christ’s ministry was the curing of blindness, and every evangelist describes ...”

“... of tequila and cocaine. From institutionalised prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come ...”

“... he was a primitive: how did he come to be the patron saint of modern art? His diaries can now be read for the first time in their original form. Joan Acocella’s restoration is a job very well done: she has elegantly failed to spare the blushes of the dead, and instead what we have is a final, proper edition of Nijinsky’s diary, a dark assemblage that can ...”

“... men who has ever lived. He could paint, draw and write almost as well as he could compose. He read Homer in Greek and spoke half a dozen other languages. He had a curatorial flair, playing a large part in the rescue of Bach’s music from oblivion, as well as Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, and as a conductor he gave historically informed ...”

“... retirement from sleuthing to pursue his interest in alcohol. (Fans recommend playing a game as you read: to try to match him drink for drink. This would be dangerous.) Nick’s wife, Nora, who never knew him in his detecting days, persuades him to take on a final case: there’s a family connection and she rather likes the excitement. She’s surprised at his ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity ...”

“... the 1966 World Cup final and the 1970 general election are extremely well done and exciting to read, even for those who remember who won. His treatment of major political figures is untypically nuanced: both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson escape the caricature that popular history has handed down. He writes effectively about the ins and outs of ...”

“... which maintains its connection to its own traditions by running the odd piece you might care to read, has a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s essays to give away with the current number. It still has some ‘Sexy but Deadly’ micro-celeb on the cover, but inside, the anxieties I’ve been talking about are more humanly displayed. Henry Sutton writes about being ...”