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“... classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas Gataker who refused a Cambridge doctorate because ‘like Cato the censor he would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was ...”

“... to mention an’ I might leave one out An’ that wouldn’t be fair Woody Guthrie, sure Big Joe Williams, yeah It’s easy to remember those names But what about the faces you can’t find again What about the curbs an’ corners an’ cut-offs that drop out a sight an’ fall behind What about the records you hear but one time What about the coyote’s ...”

“... his children. Complicating matters, Marable reports, was the fact that one of the women, Evelyn Williams, had been a girlfriend of Malcolm’s during his Boston days. Deeply upset, Malcolm confronted three of the women, including Evelyn. ‘From their own mouths,’ Malcolm told Haley, ‘I heard their stories of who had fathered their children.’ They ...”

“... to and including The Rainbow. Lawrence’s descriptions of the life of the body connect him with Thomas Hardy, a novelist deeply implicated in 19th-century materialism, and one he was writing about in the second half of 1914, shortly before he began to revise ‘The Wedding Ring’. Hardy was fascinated by the way a body can be so altered during a lifetime ...”

“... as group biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her ...”

“... the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], ...”

“... cure even the most Irish of us of our Englishness. In The Occasions of Poetry there are essays on Williams, Snyder and Robert Duncan, and in Shelf Life on Whitman, H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and two essays on Robert Duncan. He reprints his review of Helen Vendler’s book of contemporary poetry (published by Harvard in the ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort of ...”

“... eager to find proof of the righteousness of their colonial project. The Harvard minister Samuel Williams went round New England collecting plant specimens, plunging thermometers into deep-water wells and tracking the migratory patterns of birds, in order to confirm his theory that the arrival of Christianity and industry on the continent had induced a more ...”

“... were unfurled in the national press, while recollections of the happy times of Elgar and Vaughan Williams encouraged proposals that after Sir Michael Tippett, the next candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era has been convincingly reified as an ...”

“... partner of Amelia Earhart, who doted on young Gore), his serio-comic encounters with Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt and Orson Welles, and his holidays in the sinister sunlight of Hollywood as a hired hand (there’s still controversy about how much homoeroticism he snuck into the screenplay of Ben-Hur – ‘I suspect that Heston does not know to ...”

“... on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an attempt to ...”

“... and a fan – even more remarkably – of William Godwin’s English Jacobin thriller, Caleb Williams. It was quite possible to combine Enlightened criticism of the Ancien Régime with a counter-revolutionary hostility to the politics of perfectibility. The quest for a political utopia provided scope not only for the amelioration of human distress, but ...”

“... truth that ‘all men are created equal,’ written into the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson. He and his co-signatories managed, notoriously, to square this truth with slave-ownership. The self-evidence born of vagueness tends to dissolve when the pitting of interests demands political resolution. Jefferson seems to have agonised, up to ...”