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“... on the House of Commons in the 1640s, on which Hexter’s best work was written, though Elizabeth Read Foster analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially ...”

“... Great Books, that Pale within which critics have comfortably nestled, is that you have to begin to read the obscure books and authors on whose behalf you have been campaigning. (Many of the weariest readers in scholarly libraries at present are feminist historical critics, busily finding the women’s writing to make an entire alternative canon.) Even within ...”

“... growing attachment to Shelley. A typical example, the entry for 9 October 1814, originally read: ‘Mary goes to bed at eight – sit up with Shelley over the fire – get rather in a horrid mood – go to bed at eleven cannot sleep all night.’ With erasures and additions this becomes: ‘We go to bed at eight – get in rather a horrid mood ...”

“... and that this clever robber is ‘perhaps beginning to realise that there is nothing to read there’ – that is, on the boy’s face – ‘that his secrets are all visible, and that she herself contributes to their visibility, to what Merleau-Ponty would call the fragment of being radiating from him within the universal flesh of the ...”

“... to Clive Bell, a number of the Bloomsbury set first heard ‘Prufrock’ in 1917, when Mansfield read it at Garsington: it ‘caused a stir, much discussion, some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more ...”

“... known as the Inklings, who met regularly in a pub or in college rooms to talk and sometimes to read and discuss drafts of work in progress. The leading members of the group, which included the Anglican writer Charles Williams during the years of the Second World War, also seem to have shared a form of conservatism – one with Tory anarchist leanings ...”

“... seal on Magna Carta and the supporting Charter of the Forests. Carpenter’s two volumes should be read in conjunction with his magisterial edition of Magna Carta for Penguin Classics.*In return, Parliament granted the king the last great tax he was to receive for thirty years. It was Henry’s doing that Parliaments increasingly met at his preferred residence ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... replied: ‘Your suggestions on “Water” might be great improvements.’ The poem finally read: It was a Maine lobster town – each morning boatloads of hands pushed off for granite quarries on the islands, and left dozens of bleak white frame houses stuck like oyster shells on a hill of rock, and below us, the sea lapped the raw little ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... on Primrose Hill, and so almost a sympathetic figure.15 April. Thinking to have something to read in Yorkshire I send out for the new Philip Roth biography, but it’s so heavy I decide it will be too much to carry. It ought to come with wheels and a lectern. Having it on one’s lap is numbing, ironically in view of its subject. The blurb describes the ...”

“... the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of ...”

“... Marcel Raymond, and then soon after, of Georges Poulet, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski and Gaston Bachelard, I am reminded of a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first in the English translation, published in 1950, of De Baudelaire au Surréalisme. It became ...”

“... Spanish population was officially illiterate and probably the same proportion again could barely read. In effect, a cultural revolution, it was brought about by an exiguous minority of mainly middle-class origin born around the turn of the century, and it preceded and coincided with the political attempt to modernise Spain under the Republic of ...”

“... during the Thirties; each was an important art-collector. But there the resemblance ends. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (1879-1953), Duke of Westminster – called Bend’Or from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary ...”