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“... of the three hundred Spartans commemorated in Simonides’ epigram on Thermopylae. For Sir Henry Newbolt there is no difference between the words of the school cricket captain with ‘Ten to make and the match to win’ and those of the schoolboy rallying the ranks when ‘the Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead.’ At the beginning of the First ...”

“... each on the other side of the window, close, but unable to touch, the spectator consigned to the green verge of life – strikes us as too blatant, too uncomplicated. We have all become knowing connoisseurs of repression and sublimation. Benson longed starkly for the land of lost content and objected to the brittle new mores of Bloomsbury: ‘They seem to ...”

“... notably in his case, by family example. Until his late thirties, like his father, the theologian Henry James Sr, he had experienced breakdowns in which invalidism was compounded by the threat of insanity; like his brother Henry, 15 months his junior, he had had acute problems with his back and with constipation; like his ...”

“... then along Wandales Lane, the old Roman road from Burrow to Sedbergh. Walking down one of the green lanes below the fells we come across a fold with a stone stile and in the centre of the fold a boulder so huge it looks like an ancient feature of the landscape, walled for its own protection; an erratic perhaps, carried down and deposited here by the ...”

“... of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come back and decide, rather doubtfully, that they must have been golden orioles. However Kate M. tells me that they were probably parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large ...”

“... paintings: to give harried New Yorkers a taste of the landscape that once flourished on their green island, and still does up the Hudson, the ‘lordly’ river (as Washington Irving called it in ‘Rip Van Winkle’) that shimmers between the buildings a few hundred yards from the walkway. Some of the most interesting paintings on view in The Shock of ...”

“... by Painlevé.) Among composers, he knew the Futurist Luigi Russolo, Edgar Varèse and later Pierre Henry, whose music he used to score The Love Life of the Octopus in 1965. The pile-up of names is important, because Painlevé seems to have learned from all of them. His films are obsessionally focused on minute anatomy, but aesthetically they invoke everything ...”

“... we have not been very successful in life’; and this park itself, brand-new, a made-island of green in all this grave ocean, and in this silence, a little noise. The leaves are blown aslant and in their shade a few lie prostrate on young grass, mothers, young girls, two boys together; and meditate, or talk inaudibly; on benches, men without colour sit ...”

“... in London. She admits to a friend that reading a biography of Proust ‘turned me for a while green with envy’ but she then concedes that ‘on the whole I’d rather spend my whole life falling between two stools than in despairing of the world in 12 volumes.’ It was actually art rather than life, which proved to be a burden for Richardson. When she ...”

“... I went​ to Henry Poole & Co, the oldest tailor on Savile Row, for a fitting. Suits start at £5500, and I couldn’t afford to have one made, but the firm had agreed to teach me the principles of bespoke tailoring by measuring me for an invisible one, so I could at least engage in the fantasy: the emperor’s new clothes ...”

“... biography of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or trying to use you as a ventriloquist’s ...”

“... that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal ...”

“... I am convinced,’ wrote Henry Church to the poet who had just dedicated to him his longest poem, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘that Mrs Stevens has had an important part to play in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.’ This was in 1943, by which time Mr and Mrs Stevens had been living together in marital discord for more than a third of a century ...”

“... Colette neglected her only daughter, born in 1913, when she was married to her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, though she had plenty of time for Henry’s son from his first marriage, Bertrand, whom she seduced in 1920, when he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with ...”

“... realisation that it is the very impossibility of her youthful emotion that makes it so intense. Henry James could have imagined the scene with a similar sympathy, yet he could never have brought himself to ‘do’ it in a novel. The quiet contrast between the onion-eating young man who makes the sisters giggle and the romantic would-be scholar who has ...”