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“... On 11 May 1831, a fastidious 25-year-old Norman aristocrat arrived in New York City with an assignment to report on American prisons for the French Ministry of Justice. Over the next nine months he travelled up the East Coast, down the Mississippi and through what was then the wild west of Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan ...”

“... the earliest extant literary telling of this phantom army, taken down by Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk, from the report of his colleague, the eyewitness. Walchelin related how he thought he wouldn’t be believed if he didn’t bring back proof, so he left his hiding place and tried to catch and mount one of the riderless black horses going by: the ...”

“... desire polish – and still more polish – But the reader coming after him, and dashing over his page, will unconsciously find that the polished words are unnatural. The grating of the file will annoy his ears, the smell of the oil will offend his nose. This is one of the few examples of practical criticism found in Trollope’s letters, and it is of a ...”

“... offered various ‘reasons’ for this cynical charade. Fortunately for posterity, their colleague Norman Tebbit spelt the issue out quite clearly at an enthusiastic meeting of the London Conservatives in 1984: The Labour Party is the party of division. In its present form it represents a threat to the democratic values and institutions on which our ...”

“... literature, a degree of sophistication more easily found in an 11th-century monastery than at a Norman court. But the story reads like a fable; it’s full of the bears, dogs, horses and donkeys that populate Aesop’s tales. It’s possible that its dedicatee, Archbishop Robert, presided over a cathedral school at Rouen. More pertinently, after detailing ...”

“... of my poetry.’ Despite this, it would be H.D. who inspired Pound’s Imagism. Fifty years later Norman Holmes Pearson wrote to her: ‘If there is a single person to whom Ezra has been constant (don’t laugh, my dear) it is you.’ After a series of academic debacles – and a broken engagement to H.D. – Pound set out for London in 1908, at the age of ...”

“... chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to forge’. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story ...”

“... Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the Atomists, Aristotle, the Stoics. (An epilogue spends a page or two on Galen.) The final score is Creationists 5, Critics 2. Many scholars have thought that one of the achievements of the earliest Greek philosophers was to give a godless account of the origins and nature of the world: they weren’t atheists, they ...”

“... Front or about the experiences of ordinary men and women, thanks to the work of historians such as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His ...”

“... it from traditional Toryism? And will it work? Mrs Thatcher is keen that we turn back the page to those inter-war figures, Ludwig von Mises and Friederich von Hayek, and see things through their lens. Ironically, in understanding Thatcherism the best place to start is with the collapse of German conservatism in the Thirties and the concomitant rise of ...”

“... the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set ...”

“... to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have seemed more dubious. With Peterley Harvest there was an additional problem because, unlike recent fictional diaries such as Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional ...”

“... long before all literature in English is similarly available. Jake Balokowsky will soon have this page on Hypertext. All this information technology will not make books obsolete, but it will mean that one can do a range of new and interesting things with books and, above all, save time for actually reading them. And with its access to the state’s ...”

“... they therefore bear some sort of responsibility. This is nowhere more apparent than in the one page Bunting devotes to the fate of Jersey’s Jews – or rather the 12 people she claims were registered as such by the Chief Aliens Officer. (Strangely, she ignores the Jews who remained off the record, including the well-known Surrealist photographer, Claude ...”

“... years most children leave home.Gorey’s guest, however, neither grows up nor leaves. The last page shows the family, whose human son has become an adult complete with moustache, standing in a conversational group. None of them is looking at the guest, who is still the same size and sits on a tasselled pouffe staring blankly in the opposite ...”