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“... In 1955, Ralph Ellison took part in a roundtable discussion on the subject ‘What’s Wrong with the American Novel?’ I came across the transcript recently and it opened my eyes. The first speakers twitter along, blaming readers for the novel’s decline. Then Ellison speaks up, and blames one party only: ‘There has been a failure of writers ...”

“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... surrogate in the Virgin Mary and spirituality in tales of sainthood and sacrifice. Aged twenty she took holy orders at the local Carmelite convent. In the following years she fell strangely ill, and during a protracted recovery became, by her own admission, a mediocre nun. This was the unpromising prelude. But then, in her forties, Teresa fell into ...”

“... enjoyed the public-school master Mountgrace-church MacDiarmid’s taste in literature: Selected John Ashbery, Schuyler, O’Hara, Gravity’s Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others bizarrer, Lord Weary, Das Schloss, Lady Windermere’s Fan ... The nymphomaniac pensioners in ‘The Sexy Old Ladies of Havergo Hall’ are less ...”

“... for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on ...”

“... laid out in the discourses he delivered as President of the Royal Academy. It was re-created by John Barrell in his influential Political Theory of Painting (1986). Drawing on J.G.A. Pocock’s politics of civic humanism, Barrell replaced the two traditions of painting with a tradition of academic theory – from Shaftesbury to Reynolds and so on – which ...”

“... trusting and contented. They walk him two miles. Two miles away from the mother who momentarily took her eyes off him. They take him to open land, beside a railway line. It is now almost dark. They strip off his lower garments. They ... what comes next, we do not know. They beat him to death. They leave his body to be cut in half by a train. Some time ...”

“... At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone. Fanny Burney, who commenced a journal at the age of 15, gave as her reason that ‘when the hour ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...”

“... spreadsheet jigsaw, mapping the stories from the Sartre biographies (Annie Cohen-Solal, John Gerassi, Ronald Hayman) over those from the Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The ...”

“... beyond his reach, went on the programme anyway and broke the taboo, which Mackay abandoned when he took up office in 1987. Pickles still seems unable to understand that it is not talking to the media but the stupid things he says to them that makes him notorious. With the exception nowadays of a few able solicitors, all judges are drawn from the relatively ...”

“... the Russells also gave Britain its last Whig prime minister, Conrad’s great-grandfather, Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, who governed as a Whig from 1846 to 1852 and afterwards as a Liberal. If his own family history helped to bring into focus the indeterminacy of political commitments on the eve of the Civil War, it was his encyclopedic ...”

“... In the February election the voters returned an uncertain decision: Harold Wilson’s Labour Party took 301 seats on 11.7 million votes, Heath’s Tories got 297 seats on 11.9 million votes, and the Liberals led by Jeremy Thorpe found that their six million votes translated into 14 seats. The Liberals’ mini-revival suggested a solution to Heath’s ...”

“... Oxford to become a lawyer, and in 1932 he was called to the Bar. On the advice of a colleague he took elocution lessons to get rid of his Yorkshire accent, and soon he had a flourishing Chancery practice. There were occasional approaches from Oxford about returning to teach, but although he maintained an amateur interest in philosophy, he declined them. He ...”

“... John Carey has had access to voluminous archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding’s family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations. He has made excellent use of these privileges, and the result is a full, friendly, and on proper occasions candid, account of a remarkable man, who took a long time to achieve an understanding of how truly remarkable he was, and then did so only fitfully ...”