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“... A copy is beside me as I write (I was junior counsel for the defence), alongside The Little White Schoolbook, a sanctimonious rebuttal that was handed out by evangelical demonstrators on the steps of the court. Taking its cue very obviously from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Handyside’s book set out to reassure older children that the adult ...”

“... one and a half, in which the plentiful photographs are reproduced, not very well, between regular white margins. The result looks like a respectable ‘art book’ designed thirty years ago. The pin-striped book production does not, however, preclude eccentricity. The Laocoön statue is reproduced both on page 138 and on page 171 – in, moreover, exactly the ...”

“... A Girl in Winter. She existed mainly, it seems, to keep a few Oxford friends – Bruce Montgomery (Edmund Crispin), Diana Gollancz and the dreadful Kingsley Amis – amused. Brunette’s work was read aloud to Montgomery and Gollancz after evenings at the pub, and its progress discussed in salacious detail in letters designed to persuade Amis that Brunette’s ...”

“... prudence. Unlike Peter Ackroyd, Holroyd doesn’t insert fictional passages; nor does he emulate Edmund Morris’s insertion of himself – as a schoolboy – into a life of Ronald Reagan. But he’s there nonetheless. It’s been possible to detect Holroyd’s presence in his narratives before: no one who read the third volume of his Shaw biography could ...”

“... and historical canon largely involved the insertion, repudiation or reordering of a cast of dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential Cambridge Texts in the History ...”

“... kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.’Hannay is sceptical about the ‘Jew-anarchists’ but notes that his neighbour’s tales of international financiers stirring up chaos for ...”

“... where his artisan father practised his trade as a glover and ‘whittawer’ – a worker of white leather, typically kidskin, and thus a producer of those ‘kid gloves’ still proverbial for their softness. The product was upmarket but the production of it messy and pungent. When Shakespeare mentions a man with a ‘great round beard, like a ...”

“... novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with Conrad and Eliot, and including Woolf, Edmund Wilson (‘No fiction writer can be read through with a steadier admiration’), Hemingway (‘Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was’) and V.S. Pritchett. But the patchiness with which he is now published and read, and the misconceptions ...”

“... Mary Fiddler, a fine blooming lass of 18, her – is like silk itself, and bubbles as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a well-known gentleman of the turf. Her movements are regular, her pace elegant, and her action is good: and when you mount her, she begins to f—k away to the tune of the ‘Dandy O ...”

“... in 1704. Not all the characters in Colley’s book were captives of foreign powers. Many were poor white underlings, caught up against their will or inclination in the steady expansion of the Empire. Take the case of Sarah Shade, an agricultural servant from Herefordshire who, in 1769, fled to India with her stepfather (who may also have been her lover). She ...”

“... their demise, and when, in ‘Among the Roman Gravemounds’, he wrote the line ‘That little white cat was his only friend,’ she found it ‘too much even for my sweet temper’. Yet in ‘Last Words to a Dumb Friend’, written when Snowdove ‘met his death’ (as Seymour-Smith grandiloquently puts it) on the railway line in 1904, Hardy transcends ...”

“... Known Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother and father died of Spanish flu in 1918 on the train on which the ...”

“... charm that fascinated Henry James and all those other competent Late Victorians (Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse, Charles Baxter) who worried interminably about the great question, ‘what to do with Louis?’ Perhaps they need not have worried. ‘Thin legged! thin-chested!’ Louis revealed considerable ability to look after himself and boss others in his ...”

“... that the American Civil War would not have taken place.’ Johnson manages to ignore the work of Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis and numerous other scholars of the past thirty years who have demonstrated that slavery was an intrinsic element of American life almost from the beginning of the colonial era, and that it imparted a powerful exclusionary ...”

“... wear the ‘absurdly uncomfortable’ clothes into which the Victorian child was squeezed, the ‘white piqué starched frocks’ and the velvet hair ribbons ‘fastened with a bit of elastic looped over a button behind the ear’ that was so tight it gave her a headache. Difficulties with clothes occur in many of her books. Peter Rabbit’s expression of ...”