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“... Scott’, and so to the tradition of cultural comparativism so strong in the American novel to Henry James and beyond. It is the comparative, multicultural nature of Don Juan that gives point to the un-English Byron’s statement in the poem:   I am half a Scot by birth, and bred A whole one. Sartor Resartus, whose Ecclefechan author began by writing ...”

“... anxious to place themselves in a context, try hard to evoke it. Sylvia Lawson, a descendant of Henry Lawson, was a pioneer –the pioneer – Australian woman literary journalist in the Fifties. In the editorial office of Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation magazine in George Street, Sydney, she would elegantly sip the wine provided while the rest of us tried to ...”

“... family that one can’t help feeling it would have been proper, as with Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, to publish the work (at least initially) under a pseudonym. The review copy of Theodore Zeldin’s first novel is accompanied by a separately-printed 2,000-word statement by the author, entitled ‘How I came to write Happiness’. This preface is ...”

“... or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his hand to get it.’ This selfishness was not a reversion to ...”

“... fling in Cambridge with a lay-clerk’. Here is the topography of the city of night, from the Bell in King’s Cross to Heaven, the electronic barn underneath Charing Cross which is Europe’s biggest gay club. Pickles’s queens appear to be encircled by some enchantment, an erotic delirium that hides the seediness surrounding them. It will be ...”

“... his daughter’s high-school scholarship in a drawer and who lived his paltry life ‘under a bell-jar – or a thimble – in a very small dark’. The accompanying story concludes with the ironic exchange (about a very unlovely father, with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one ...”

“... Plath, who for Hawthorn had the problem that being a woman – personified in the heroine of The Bell Jar – ‘she is not granted the luxury of a double life.’ But Madame Bovary has one – indeed, three lives and more. Plath’s problem was certainly connected with this disability but took a different form. Like many fictional heroines, she was trying ...”

“... Yankee cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money springs ...”

“... a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their ...”

“... and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a ...”

“... Instead, I was truthful, and told her it was as if I was living in that terrible movie Regarding Henry, in which Harrison Ford gets shot in the head during a convenience-store hold-up and afterwards becomes a mental child and can no longer make love to his wife. I used to be able to do this; I know I used to be able to do this. I used to be able to make love ...”

“... was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where ...”

“... to have him in the Cabinet all the same. Powell was uneasy (‘it’s like having a debate with Henry VIII – I was conscious that he had the axe down by his chair’), while Macmillan complained that ‘Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable Popes.’ Powell won. Lord Home came to the Cabinet room one day to find ...”

“... 1936 Buick in 1949, and how the dealers rooked him on each trade-in. In another, he is hired by Ma Bell to lecture her junior executives on The Brothers Karamazov, in the hope of reducing ‘patterns of over-conformity’ among the staff. Schwartz is unable to appear natural or at case in these pieces, and it is hard to believe that each one underwent numerous ...”

“... he could have given us the Court of George IV just as his hero Holbein gave us that of Henry VIII – but he saw history painting as a duty and he rejected the invitation with disdain. The transformation that Ingres worked on flesh does not obliterate personality. M. Bertin, the journalist, hands on knees – almost, but not quite on the point of ...”