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“... way from the marriage plot, which underwires so much literature. ‘It’s the story of life,’ Robert Sean Leonard’s character once explained on the TV show House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting ...”

“... regarded this as its best effort was widely thought to be embarrassing. As the movie’s director Robert Zemeckis gave his speech of acceptance (which he did, excruciatingly, by speaking ‘on behalf of Forrest Gumps everywhere’), the girl seated next to Madonna, in the words of my colleague Frank DiGiacomo, ‘turned to the pop star and displayed the ...”

“... included verse in Middle English, Latin, Old French and Old English as well as the language of Robert Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and ...”

“... Kempson – Vanessa, Corin and Lynn – became actors. Vanessa then married the film director Tony Richardson and gave birth to two more actresses, Natasha and Joely Richardson. The latter was born the same year as Corin’s daughter Jemma Redgrave, also an actress. Corin was named after the shepherd in As You Like It and ...”

“... the Frost of the anthologies, the author of ‘guidebooks for the spirit of individualism’, as Robert Faggen puts it, attracted to empty woods and roads less travelled, and suspicious of New Deals and other easy offers of a lift. But real individualists don’t read guidebooks, and Frost wasn’t writing them. On receiving the Emerson-Thoreau medal in ...”

“... collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ideas which have ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”

“... Letters, Robert Lovelace remarks in Clarissa, are a way of ‘writing from the heart’. A brilliant letter-writer though a terrible etymologist, Lovelace finds warrant for this belief in the word correspondence: letters (so he thinks) touch the core, the coeur, of their senders’ being, revealing their innermost thoughts and sensations, showing their essential character ...”

“... trad Crime Club stuff at all, and, while preserving an 18th-century decorum, it even stands Richardson on his head: seduction is here wholly the work of women. The heroine’s strategies are those of a Lovelace or Valmont. The assurance with which the lovely Ned, the Adonis of the title, is treated as a sex-object would seem outrageous nowadays if it ...”

“... a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing. I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the ...”

“... Shamela and Joseph Andrews, were triggered by his dislike of one of the earliest English novels, Richardson’s Pamela, and both treated its author as a low vulgarian, in a manner plainly derived from the older satirists’ treatment of the dunces and Grub Street hacks. One of the piquancies of the case was that the patrician Fielding picked up his lordly ...”

“... workhouse has been saved from demolition because it’s reckoned, on evidence detailed by Ruth Richardson in Dickens and the Workhouse, that it must be the most famous workhouse of all – the one in Oliver Twist. The claim isn’t convincing. Oliver Twist’s workhouse is 75 miles north of London and if it ever existed outside Dickens’s imagination ...”

“... the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice ...”

“... Johnny to the church rather than the police, and a struggling artist (ludicrously overplayed by Robert Newton) drags Johnny back to his room in order to paint him, hoping to ratchet up a failing talent by catching the light in a dying man’s eyes. This is where things go half-baked. In Johnny’s delirium, pictured as a J. Arthur Rank version of ...”

“... composition, but finishing a book made Cheyne physically sick. Late in his life, he told Samuel Richardson that ‘I never wrote a Book in my Life but that I had a Fit of Illness after.’ Neglect and bad reviews made his spirits ‘jumbled and turbid’, throwing him into a ‘vertiginous Paroxysm’ so dizzying that he was forced ‘to lay hold on the ...”