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“... This, the third of seven volumes in the Cambridge collection, contains 942 letters written by Lawrence in something under five years. Harry T. Moore’s Collected Letters of 1962 did the whole job in less than twice as many pages, though it’s true he didn’t print quite everything; and many more letters have turned up over the last twenty years. They are still turning up: this volume contains letters, formerly unknown, to Robert Mountsier, who later became Lawrence’s agent in the US, and a batch to Douglas Goldring ...”

“... was an agent lured by money. In his authorised history of MI5, published in 2009, Christopher Andrew concluded that Stonehouse had indeed spied for the Czechoslovaks, becoming ‘the only British politician (so far as is known) to have acted as a foreign agent while holding ministerial office’. Julian Hayes, Stonehouse’s great nephew, has also ...”

“... For Sher, the Scottish printers and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a ...”

“... by the Tory Whips office, in particular by two young MPs, David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts and Andrew Mitchell, whose father, David Mitchell, is also a Tory MP, and once chose Neil Hamilton to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The Guardian had told a bit of the story. Parliament had uncovered none of it. And that might have been an end to ...”

“... names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from Victorian days, when men called even their closest friends by their surnames, to the ...”

“... work done by scholars in recent decades: Richard Bulliet on the economic importance of the camel, Andrew Watson on the role of the Arabs as introducers of new crops, Oleg Grabar on the Dome of the Rock, and so on. It is, however, a tribute to both the scope and depth of Lewis’s research in the past half-century that so much of the material he draws on is ...”

“... liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and ...”

“... them for it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: And O! to think that there are members o’ St Andrew’s Societies sleepin’ soon, Wha tae the papers wrote afore they bedded On regimental buttons or buckled shoon, Or use o’ England where the UK’s meent. The Conservatives want to go on believing that political union is essential at once to the ...”

“... the whole thing there), his plain-but-emotional rhythms and syntax remind one of Larkin and even Andrew Motion. A more surprising influence is Eliot: ‘My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark’ has the sort of rhythmical hysteria and claustrophobic shadowiness that Hamilton has made his own; and a line from ‘La Figlia Che ...”

“... a semblance of normality after the suspension caused by the war. After Tylor, there is William Robertson Smith and the sociological-collectivist view of ancient religion; then Smith’s friend and sometime follower J.G. Frazer, the exemplar of the individualist-intellectualist view; and Baldwin Spencer and Andrew Lang ...”

“... community’ of Scotland only exist completely in song? Can it live by culture alone? Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a bitter opponent of the 1707 Union, quoted a famous saying: ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ The novelist James ...”

“... just as a subsequent generation would reveal a sneaking admiration for Napoleon. Goldie remarks of Andrew Marvell, who had welcomed Cromwell as a Machiavellian ruler, that under Charles II he ‘did not wish to unking his prince: he wanted him to be one.’ The radical Whigs of 1688-9 (whose ideas on the right of political resistance are traced in an essay by ...”

“... come in with the Assange party. ‘Rumoured ghostwriter. Rumour confirmed?’ she wrote. Geoffrey Robertson, for Assange, argued that the person in Sweden who issued the warrant, Marianne Ny, was not, as she described herself, the ‘chief prosecutor’, but a minor prosecutor not qualified to do what she did. This seemed weak to me. I also wondered whether ...”

“... too rollicking either. In his preface to the new Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Ritchie Robertson says the novels ‘were often understood with dutiful awe as intellectual fiction of a high order, top-heavy with German philosophy and history’, and continues: ‘Over-attention to this aspect of Mann’s fiction often distracted readers, especially ...”

“... Occasional presidential use of phrases popular with preachers like Falwell and Robertson could be used to give them quiet recognition. A top campaign operative told Newsweek that during the critical 2000 primary in South Carolina, sending Bush to ultra-fundamentalist Bob Jones University had been a calculated appeal to Christian right ...”