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“... to memory by the fraternity’. Although Aldington managed to remain on friendly terms with Norman Douglas and Pino Orioli until their deaths, it was a close-run thing, for both were homosexual. ‘Norman himself was apt to describe some of the men he disliked as “the wrong kind of sod, my dear”,’ Aldington ...”

“... haste and recently died in California of a drug overdose. So much for the facts. One of Roger Lewis’s main achievements in his new and frankly enormous biography – at least four times longer than any of the others – is to have fleshed this skeleton out to the point of corpulence with a great deal of arcane and exhaustively researched detail. But the ...”

“... At All Souls in 1932, Lewis Namier provoked Isaiah Berlin by scornfully dismissing the history of ideas – dismissing it in German, though the rest of the conversation (or rather harangue) was conducted in English – as ‘what one Jew cribs from another’. But for some unpredictable migrations and a few world-historical hiccups in the previous decades, this exchange might have been taking place – quite possibly in French – in, say, Warsaw or St Petersburg ...”

“... of Trident missiles.’ Some Conservative MPs were worried by the mixed messages. Julian Lewis, the veteran Cold Warrior who once hired a light aircraft to trail a banner reading ‘Kremlin sends Kongratulations’ over the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, wrote to the Financial Times: ‘When Conservative MPs met to consider forming the ...”

“... prided himself on being the only person who could claim the friendship of those arch-enemies C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. Lewis and Williams both aimed at the disruption of the realist novel though the use of erudite fantasy, drawing on Dante and Plato and Milton; they wanted to make contemporary England ...”

“... her phone number, but when we last see him he is back in the room with the installation, watching Norman Bates, ‘scary bland’, put down the phone. The man suddenly imagines the museum guard shooting himself in the head, feels closer than ever to Norman Bates, and thinks again about his mother, dying or perhaps ...”

“... encapsulation of jungle heat and the ultimate ‘fuck you’ war conditions on Guadalcanal. Even Norman Mailer, much given to such usage, wasn’t allowed to say it in The Naked and the Dead, where the marines, somewhat famously, were forced by his publishers Rinehart & Co to say ‘fug you’. The bigger problems in The Pacific began in the first ...”

“... hard to believe that, not so many decades ago, Jonathan Cape, on receiving the manuscript of Norman Lewis’s fifth novel, wrote to Lewis thanking him and saying that the book was ‘very promising’. Not even first novels are touted as merely ‘promising’ these days, though that’s inevitably what most of ...”

“... 15 October 1998 in his 71st year. Born in Glasgow, he was taken to the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis as a very young child after his father, a merchant seaman, died of tuberculosis. Iain’s mother brought up her three sons in a Gaelic-speaking household and worked as a ‘herring girl’, gutting fish with her hacked, salt-smarting hands. Murdo ...”

“... if not the glorification of the present’. There is a further near coincidence. In 1929, Lewis Namier began the patient deconstruction of England’s constitutional myths in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which jettisoned a grand narrative of statesmanship and party principle, and put in its place the microscopic study of ...”

“... of the family tradition. Family is, ostensibly, the organising theme of Shades of Greene. Jeremy Lewis has not attempted to add yet another Life of the most famous Greene, but has written a narrative account of aspects of the lives of the more prominent Greene siblings and cousins, Graham included. The bloodstock details are quickly stated. Grandfather ...”

“... a pea below her twenty mattresses is hurting her. A prince is metamorphosed from a frog (the poet Norman MacCaig used to say it would be even better if a frog metamorphosed from a prince). Wordsworth, feeling he had to deplore the increasingly moralistic instruction of the young, refers in The Prelude to those ‘guards and wardens’ who would ‘control all ...”

“... as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but the three poets in question are sufficiently daunting to require no other company. Indeed, I wonder if they need one another’s company in this instance. The chapters on Pound are less interesting than those on Yeats and ...”

“... and its surrounding hills, out over Eddrachillis Bay to the waters of the Minch, with the Isle of Lewis away in the distance. At least that should have been the view, but when we got to the summit a drenching squall of wind-driven hail had obscured all, even our boat, the Poplar Voyager, anchored in the loch 1500 feet below. The descent was precipitous and ...”

“... when uttered by Conservatives who had risen from the lower middle class, like Thatcher herself or Norman Tebbit, but is impossible to swallow from Cameron and other graduates of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, who carry out acts of vandalism dressed in bow tie and tails. Exposure to the real lives of typical Britons would probably blur the concept of ...”