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“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... as a symbol of all that was immature, unreflective and dangerous about the United States. In 1926 Lewis Mumford said that ‘the deficiencies of Mr Dewey’s philosophy are the deficiencies of the American scene itself.’ Waldo Frank, writing in 1929, said that ‘it is just to liken John Dewey to a child.’ Entering his ninth decade as World War Two ...”

“... most of his career in chaotic exile, in France and the US. Ford is self-condemned, like Wyndham Lewis. His London is as fantastic now as the Magnetic City, protected by river and man-made canals, in Lewis’s The Human Age trilogy: ‘The blank-gated prodigious city was isolated by its riverine moat.’The compulsion to ...”

“... of oppressive respectability. Some instances of slumming can, of course, be furnished: C. Day Lewis was free to write detective fiction under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake and so not soil the reputation of the serious poet. Pseudonymy is essentially a disguise, a device for throwing readers off the scent. For absolute security’s sake the choice of ...”

“... apropos of this whether hunting the spies would have taken the same turn if it had not been for Lewis Namier. His work on the 18th-century Parliament pioneered the study of friendship and connection as the building blocks of 18th-century Parliamentary politics, a method that was quickly taken up and adapted for other periods, the 14th and 15th centuries ...”

“... Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first ...”

“... and critics. The part they played has been recognised in this centenary year by the reissue of Michael Longley’s perceptive, beautifully introduced Selected Poems and by the addition of a fine preface by Derek Mahon to The Strings Are False. It would be good to have back in print Edna Longley’s study of 1988 which did so much to rescue MacNeice from ...”

“... He was born in Cambridge in 1903. His father was President of Magdalene College and his brother Michael became famous as Archbishop of Canterbury. Most of his short life was spent in Cambridge. After gaining a first in mathematics at Trinity in 1924, he was elected, at 21, to a fellowship of King’s and a university lectureship in mathematics – positions ...”

“... useful supplement to A Moveable Feast, qualifying the nasty portraits therein of Ford and Wyndham Lewis and explaining how it was that Hemingway acquired quite a reputation as a writer without actually publishing anything. Here, too, began his career as a bully. If it’s true that perfect strangers occasionally went up to him and hit him it can only be ...”

“... Fellow of Magdalen, where he was treated with undisguised contempt by his fellow Fellow C.S. Lewis, who regarded Robinson as a typical scientist and an object of almost automatic censure. Todd himself went to Oriel College, where his proficiency in lawn tennis helped him to become integrated into the student body. Compared to Frankfurt, the Dyson Perrins ...”

“... open to infections that were thought, in industrialised countries, to be things of the past. As Lewis Thomas points out in his contribution to In Time of Plague, it gives us a glimpse of how most people in the world have always died: painfully, usually at an early age. And Aids, in another sense, returns us to the condition of our more recent forebears: it ...”

“... a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the ...”

“... Department of Justice for clemency. On 2 July 2007, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence on Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. Libby had been convicted the previous March of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of the CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. He had been sentenced to 30 ...”

“... conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of London) Battalion (Poplar and Stepney Rifles), the London Regiment, who had died in the war and was buried near Amiens. Facts about him are scarce. My grandmother, whose only brother he was, has been dead now for twenty ...”