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“... extracted exorbitant amounts of interest on his loans, and the unsavoury duo of Thomas Bridgen and William Holt Averell, who ended up acquiring, by various devious stratagems, much of the land and property that had made up his father’s estate. Cooper was no naif in such matters, but his situation was formidably complicated: as the youngest of four sons, he ...”

“... Elizabethans and Jacobeans, but no one else gave pride of place to the most laborious of those masters. Gurney sets no store at all by ‘spontaneity’, except as an effect, an illusion achieved by great labour. And even the effect, precisely because he had himself achieved it in his beautifully mellifluous early work – see ‘Only the Wanderer’ from ...”

“... who had had the benefit of an expensive formal education. And he was appalled to find most of the masters incapable of teaching anything except ‘that pose of boredom towards learning and everything connected with it which is notoriously part of the English public school man’s character’. The Autobiography showed that Collingwood had never learned the ...”

“... that others regard as shameful. They are powerless to resist sexual exploitation or abuse by their masters. It is not so much these actions themselves, as the stories to which they give rise and which give them meaning, that interest Gilsenan. ‘Men struggle to reproduce, memorialise and guarantee narratives of being and place in the world against the ...”

“... kitsch. (Picasso the maker of monstrosities, Picasso the woman-hater, Picasso recycler of the Old Masters.) But it did happen. Look at Pollock’s Male and Female; look at de Kooning’s Woman 1. The implacable dialectical example was not necessarily immobilising. I steer back to my topic. This balance of distance and literalness, which is modernism’s way ...”

“... had uprooted the blacks from their native culture, then sold parents and children to different masters. The historian Stanley Elkins darkened the picture by comparing slavery to the Holocaust. Like European Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, the American blacks had been so traumatised by the loss of all their old ‘family and kinship arrangements ...”

“... a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett ...”

“... childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest young boyish masters the world had ever seen. The critics concerned with modern children’s fiction tend to see the sought growth in terms of identity problems: sometimes, of course, class identity, and especially pride in a working-class or ethnic identity, while ...”

“... offenders, bad sorts and those convicted of odious crimes – servants who stole from their masters or aided thieves to break and enter, and those guilty of robbery with violence. In this way, the ‘old regime’ possessed a flexibility which allowed selective targeting. It was increasingly reckoned to be a blunt blade, however, on account of its ...”

“... Book of Fish what amounted to a new chapter miraculously appeared.’ Purportedly written by one William Buelow Gould, a 19th-century ‘recidivist convict artist’, the book contains a spiralling, multi-coloured text interspersed with paintings of fish. Sid is entranced by its ‘clandestine rainbow of tales’, and decides to investigate further. He finds ...”

“... about the same time a mural appeared in Somers Town, in which she figures, as well as her husband William Godwin, their daughter Mary Shelley, and a crowd of later locals which includes Dickens, who lived there as a child, though sadly not Hazlitt, whose Liber Amoris is set in Somers Town. The mural is the work of the artist Karen Gregory. It’s on the side ...”

“... dedicated to preserving the authority of the canon, and to parading a spectacular array of great masters and great masterpieces in a ‘pure’ space, cocooned from the gross, corrupt world of politics, ideology and social strife. Monographs and surveys are still published today in great numbers, of course; and there remain large parts of the discipline ...”

“... scheme, which, as he remarks, does not work well for the later part of life. But, as our masters are prone to ask these days, what is the utility and social significance of this project? As Burrow says, the various schemes give no good answers to someone who wants to know, for instance, at what age one became an adult. The schemes are traditional and ...”

“... on the American literary scene were anti-Stalinist socialists who defended Trotsky. In 1937 William Philips and Philip Rahv had revived Partisan Review as a left-wing anti-Stalinist literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James ...”

“... benefits cheat.’ Alison ends up in prison. ‘The Winshaw Prize’ opens with a quote from William Cowper which reminds us that satire can be ‘either grave or gay’ – Number 11 is mostly grave – but goes on to bemoan satire’s ineffectiveness: ‘What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaim’d/By rigour? or whom laughed into ...”