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“... will not be able to understand this material, and should not try. Across a striking hiatus in MS, we are then led to a vigorous magnification of the imagination as the supreme element of poetry, and an energetic defence of Wordsworth’s poetry which begins with a recitation of its faults. Interspersed with these arguments are comic accounts of the ...”

“... The fourth volume of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy opens with a recommendation for Mr Harry Pouncy, ‘Lecturer and Entertainer’, of Dorchester, apparently with a view to his extending his fascinations to a wider public. There follows a note to Desmond MacCarthy suggesting – surely with the firm touch of a provincial or a Victorian survivor – that it would be better if the New Quarterly were called instead the Quarterly Herald or Quarterly Clarion, ‘or some such ...”

“... we also need to be reminded that Utopia was only the book’s subtitle. ‘I am sending you my “Nowhere”, which is nowhere well written,’ More wrote teasingly to Erasmus in September 1516, and the enclosed manuscript, when it appeared in print three months later, bore the title, ‘On the Best State of the Commonwealth, and of the New ...”

“... deepest support, ultimate goal, its primal source, primal meaning, primal value, are laid open to me as soon as I lay myself open ... The last and first reality, God, is thus seen more or less as the guarantor of the rationality of human reason.’ Without belief in God, that is, to trust in reason would be unreasonable. A first problem with these contentions ...”

“... pasting of late. During the last century, he was canonised in one way or another by R.W. Chambers, Robert Bolt and the Catholic church. By contrast the More of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue ...”

“... homosexuality as given, but writes as though it did not become open until the appearance of Robert Kerr in 1607. Twenty years ago Roger Lockyer initiated a serious reappraisal of the homosexual ambience at James’s Court in his biography of Buckingham. One would have expected a fuller discussion of this important subject from the author of Close ...”

“... line – nowhere to better purpose than on Canto 36, the translation of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’, where his elucidation of the psychology and metaphysics of Albertus Magnus is so far as I know unprecedented, and awesomely illuminating. Moreover, having to decide with each batch of cantos those that he will concentrate on, he honourably steers ...”

“... on the muzak and the mailing of America. It is no small relief, therefore, to be reminded by Robert Middlekauf, a leading historian of the American Enlightenment, that Franklin was in fact a complicated and charming man with the will heartily to dislike any number of people who stood in his way. People like William Penn, for example, the absentee ...”

“... Country than anyone else alive. Elsewhere her touch is not as sure as it might be. Describing Sir Robert Kerr (anglicised to Carr), James I’s favourite, who obtained Ralegh’s estate, as ‘a penniless Scotsman from Roxburghshire’ does not tell us a great deal and it misses the irony that Kerr was no more and no less than the Scottish equivalent of an ...”

“... Henry Adams is a rare bird in American letters: rich, autonomous, and socially unassailable; descendant of Presidents, secure within the genteel Establishment, yet holding himself aloof from it; historian of his country, toward which he felt a proprietary concern; and, by his own reckoning, ‘a failure in politics and literature, in society and in solitude, in hatred and in love ...”

“... when considering these four books, all of which show the industry in dire need of reform. Stanley Adams is an Oxford graduate of Maltese descent who, following sudden imprisonment, lost his wife, his earning power and nearly all his material possessions. He now lives on supplementary benefit in a small London flat, with the rent paid by the Borough of ...”

“... to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton dared his fellow delegate ...”

“... Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell ...”

“... generosity of vision which deserves the respect even of those whose loyalties are opposed to his. My concern here is not with this theme, but with the role of ‘narrative’ within it. The word is used most often, perhaps, in the phrase ‘Palestinian narrative’, variously meaning or implying ‘history’, ‘story’, ‘predicament’, ‘side of the ...”

“... statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling all picked up the idea, so that by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented: ‘A “search for the Mother” had become a major component of the “unconscious nostalgias of the Western intellectual”.’ The only such ...”