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“... but useful in providing provisional relief: some of these things are finely dealt with in John Wiltshire’s Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, recently reviewed in this paper. This is yet another way of being literal-minded, characteristically Johnsonian and quite remote from anything specifically ‘oriental’. Johnson’s Orient is, perhaps ...”

“... distended immodesty. His fellow donors include the late Bee Gee Robin Gibb, the mobile phone baron John Caudwell and the pornographer Richard Desmond: their name liveth for evermore all right, prominently, in a niche on the western side of the structure. The memorial to the 55,573 nameless dead airmen of Bomber Command and its few thousand survivors has ...”

“... was the story of a woman’s life as a house slave on the North Carolina plantation of John Hill Wheeler, her escape to New Jersey in 1857, and her composition of an autobiographical fiction incorporating ‘elements of the many sentimental sagas she had evidently borrowed from Mr Wheeler’s shelf’. Although ‘replete with the heavy-handed ...”

“... how such land-bound creatures as the Spaniards managed to get to America at all. Did Sir Richard Hawkins say his latitude was 48°, three degrees north of where he ought to have been? Then he meant 50° 48' – ‘how so obvious an error got into the text is immaterial.’ He saw a peopled country with many fires? That could easily be the uninhabited ...”

“... A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing. The most satisfying book about Housman is A.S.F. Gow’s Housman: A Sketch but, as Mr Graves says, its aims are limited, since it is mainly concerned with Housman’s scholarship. Mr Graves’s book takes us through Housman’s life, stage ...”

“... was first displayed to the public in the late Georgian and early Victorian London theatre. In John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings of prehistoric life from the 1830s, gruesome monsters tear at one another in the slime. They appeared as mezzotints at the front of popular geological books, and in a folio work on the bones of sea-dragons by Thomas ...”

“... can embody the ideas and ideals, even the ideologies, of its moment of composition. Erick Hawkins as the Husbandman (1944) The dance was given its final title only a month before its premiere, after Graham read Hart Crane’s epic poem ‘The Bridge’ – ‘O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;/Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward ...”

“... was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of ...”

“... given to jokes, even if his poems are often wry:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit or else, shall wewhy not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.‘I Know a Man’ was included in Creeley’s first major ...”

“... choruses, before the band enters, consist of full-throttle solos by his star sidemen, Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and Rex Stewart on cornet, as though their deep, manly voices – their figurative brass – would distract listeners from the ensemble’s complicity and literal support of the song’s demeaning lyrics, sung by Katherine Handy ...”

“... emperor ruled around a hundred million people. A few years earlier, an EIC merchant called William Hawkins had fairly accurately estimated Jahangir’s annual revenue as in excess of £54 million – many, many times larger than Stuart crown revenue. On arrival, Roe presented the company’s gifts, the main items being a keyboard instrument known as a ...”

“... thought I’d been drinking.’ The Amis style, though, doesn’t altogether fit its new context. John Self would gorge himself on emetic burgers but he wouldn’t analyse his own motives for cholesterol abuse, as Miller does: ‘I knew the stuff I was cramming into my body was crap, but I also knew there was something seductive and pleasure-giving about it ...”

“... unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built. Expressionist ...”

“... untrustworthy nature of all politicians. It still seems probable that the likes of Steve Baker and John Redwood will vote against the agreement even if doing so destroys the government and the Brexit cause. Perhaps they seek a satisfying martyrdom as the only pure and incorruptible Brexiteers – the Robespierre and Saint-Just of our revolution.Third, what the ...”

“... press, Parliament and public for the first time since emancipation. Eyre’s critics were led by John Stuart Mill, his supporters by the likes of Carlyle and Ruskin. But the issue for Mill and liberal opinion was the legality of the punitive actions, not the source of the protest, which was the social, political and economic oppression of the majority black ...”