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“... reflected that, while kind hearts and simple faith were excellent things in their way, a hint of Norman blood would do no harm. Like Joyce, writing obsessively about the Ireland he had quitted, he achieved fame as a chronicler of the family, the institution from which he fought a long campaign to escape. Slightly inconsistently, he married, after a long ...”

“... of home, family and childhood: but this cannot be done for Emma, and by the end of the third page of Ms Fraser’s narrative her heroine is already 12 years old. Even the place and date of her birth are uncertain; her father was perhaps a pit-worker, certainly illiterate, and died a few weeks after his daughter’s birth. The child began life as Emy ...”

“... encounter a personality that seems compounded of Mr Pooter and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On the first page of Volume Six, in a letter to Sydney Cockerell, Hardy appears in the role of the Old Buffer: ‘I have kept all right so far this winter, but won’t brag.’ Three days later, in a note thanking John Middleton Murry for a presentation copy of one of his ...”

“... capsized by a Roman catapult shooting a bag of loose stones into the belly of the sail; or that a Norman at the fireside sits with one hand on his chin, while a Saxon rests his head in both hands. In one of the earlier Indian stories, ‘The Return of Imray’, we accept in the same way that a corpse has been lodged for a month or more in the ...”

“... At the end of a recent and refreshingly untypical poem R.S. Thomas, recalling his sea-captain father, addresses him where he lies in his grave:               And I, can I accept your voyages are done; that there is no tide high enough to float you off this mean shoal of plastic and trash? We have heard something like this before, in more reverberant metre: But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked ...”

“... my non-location of which has now been irritating me for weeks. From a little blue book, about a Norman baron dying. I only remember bits, and probably misremember those: In his chamber, weak and dying, Was a Norman baron lying … I couldn’t find this in Scott (school prize), nor in Kipling’s Collected Verse. I have ...”

“... suffered for the cause, as evangelists frequently do) laboured over this almost four-hundred-page-long testament with admirable zeal and devotion. What his own voice has recorded is thickly interspersed with quotations from letters, essays, broadcast talks, lectures, and, of course, poems by the bard himself – and photographs. He doesn’t often make ...”

“... me in the corridor as ‘a disgrace to the Scottish race’. It was not simple pornography or Page Three that worried the promoters of the Bill. Time after time the same example arose – the necessary copulation scene in The Singing Detective. What concerned them was not the casual and continual violence of Starsky and Hutch but the single act of ...”

“... counterpart. The ruling class of England, and much of the rest of Britain, was re-created by the Norman Conquest. Most of the nobly born have at one time or another sought to find progenitors among the Companions of the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ‘aristocrat’ themselves come from French. Within two decades, the Conquest had ...”

“... to reinvent: his The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. has been reviewed in these pages, nor are Norman Stone, James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes always less fanciful. And if Hitler’s personality remains an unanswered question, so too, does the history of National Socialism – which a book like Robert Harbison’s recent Deliberate Regression: The ...”

“... stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the afternoon of 10 April 2007 I was on a ...”

“... 372 photographs (between a third and a half of them coloured, a large number of them full-page), a densely written, authoritative and properly referenced text, close on 1200 informative footnotes. As one has come to expect from Yale, the volume is value for money. Despite the quality of the text, this is first and foremost a picture book. And what ...”

“... is now focused on the question of whether Joyce copied the Christian name of a certain Conolly Norman from a page in Thom’s Directory on which it was spelled with one ‘n’ or from a perhaps more significant page on which it was spelled with two. But the differences between the ...”

“... There is a story that when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming ‘Hi, Norman!’ in the Index, next to Mailer’s name. A similar tactic might happily have been ventured by the publishers of Philip Larkin’s Letters: the book’s back pages are going to be well-thumbed ...”

“... hairlines to letters and to thicken the ends of strokes with serifs. The architecture of the page balances words and pictures with absolute assurance. The contrast between the two – between the functional and the decorative, the utilitarian and the demonstrative, the more than adequately fluent and the highly finished – is just one which the depth ...”