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“... of – variously but far from exhaustively – Arnold Toynbee, A.J.P. Taylor, Maurice Cowling, Lawrence Stone and the Cerberus of Scottish historiography, William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the scars borne by the ...”

“... understand her specific role in Bloomsbury, and what differentiated her from others in the group. James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us an opportunity to think anew about these questions, condensing, as it does, twenty years of scholarship and research since Quentin Bell’s classic two-volume Life came out in the early ...”

“... their British dimension, but has ranged far beyond them. One hero of The Ancient Constitution was James Harrington, whose Oceana (1656) offered his countrymen a new, republican language of politics. Subsequently Harrington has become a hero of a much larger story. Republicanism is the theme of the second of Pocock’s two main books, The Machiavellian Moment ...”

“... into certain magazines.’ (Williams had trouble finding a reliable publisher until 1937, when James Laughlin’s fledgling New Directions made him one of its central authors.) Williams could be sensitive, too, about his apparent distaste, or incapacity, for step-by-step arguments: he called himself (in the 1948 poem ‘Russia’) ‘a ...”

“... Ferrier, Brontë; Victorian boredom in Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope; modern boredom in Eliot, James, Waugh, Lawrence, Stein, Brookner, Berryman, Barthelme and Bellow. This list represents only a part of the vast amount of material covered by Spacks; her book sometimes seems like an elaborately annotated ...”

“... to have its volume revised and expanded by Yale.* The mid-18th-century country house designed by James Paine is described as ‘utilitarian’ but ‘counterbalanced with magnificent and ornate interiors’. It belonged to the Lamb family, forebears of Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, Lord Melbourne and was bought in the 1920s by a Liverpool ...”

“... literature, in Doubles, he explored themes of duality, of divided identity, in works ranging from James Hogg to Martin Amis. In Rebecca’s Vest he encounters these same tensions as shapers of his own experience, his own divided self. As he discovers when he comes to read through his adolescent diaries, Miller is both revealer and concealer. His candour is ...”

“... For being a woman in fiction is a serious matter, and it was the men, from Richardson to Henry James, who recognised the fact, and portrayed women in a proper isolation, and therefore a proper individuality. Emily – the ‘only’ Brontë, according to the Leavises – was not a bit interested in the seriousness and exclusiveness of being a woman, and ...”

“... proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s book, suggesting that one day a great biography might be built on its workmanlike foundations. That was 12 years ago and no such thing has materialised: unless Miller’s own memoirs, now in gestation, miraculously turn up trumps, it looks as ...”

“... perhaps even more than the soldier writers, its lessons for our civilisation: Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence. These were the older generation to whom we looked for examples. They did not reflect in their work the conditions of the Western Front, but they shared a generalised despair about Western civilisation. In the masterpieces of Joyce and Eliot, two ...”

“... enough you can buy yourself in at the top as a ‘pay driver’. In 2017 the Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll paid $80 million to Williams to let his son Lance race for them. For the 2019 season Lawrence bought his own team. That Lance is not the slowest driver in the paddock – he came 12th in the ...”

“... her mouth, or break from her. The blackmail story, which Fullerton related pathetically to Henry James as well as to Edith Wharton, his new mistress (or one of them), might, one thinks, have been all an interesting fiction to put a polite face on Fullerton’s lack of interest in committing himself elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes, following Arsène Lupin, would ...”

“... strikingly than Erik Erikson, ‘identity’s architect’ as he is rather grandiosely titled by Lawrence Friedman: he made identity his key concept because it was something he was deprived of in a dramatic way. To the end of his days, he had no idea who his father was. Erikson’s name may now ring a bell for very few people, and even they may be surprised ...”

“... the fact that Larkin brought no ready-made outside attitudes to it – good or bad. Like his hero Lawrence he was shamelessly himself. The attack on Larkin is thus fundamentally an attack on the idea of personality – personality devoid of the appropriate ideological trimmings. For Larkin that was what art was all about. He declined to enter into any ...”

“... There is no sentimentalism here – well, except perhaps when it comes to considerations of James Laughlin’s almost useless Tzotzil dictionary, or Edward James’s exotic house at Xilitla. The quixotic and semi-aristocratic qualities of people like Wodehouse who are not driven either by ‘the falling rate of ...”