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“... had hidden under the sofa. A Jeeves before his time, Manners imperturbably laid a place for His Majesty on the carpet and put down the plate. He was retiring discreetly when the King said (still sous bergère), ‘That was very good … Manners.’ The pun was thought to signal a further stage in the King’s recovery. The anecdote hasn’t found its way ...”

“... to lines by Goethe, which his mother often quoted, ‘written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him’, as though it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for Carlyle to have given a book to his mother. But the most significant passage comes shortly after he has been given the news of ...”

“... bent on preserving heroic dignity even in defilement, as in Pope’s ‘Slow rose a form, in majesty of Mud.’ Oldham’s nearest Augustan analogue is in Swift, who declined the ‘lofty Stile’ and the elevations of mock-heroic, and whose aggrandisements, like Oldham’s, tended to unruly forms: Rabelaisian enumerations, hyperbolic extermination ...”

“... by section 9(3), which provided that the Act was to ‘continue in force until such date as His Majesty may by Order in Council declare to be the date on which the emergency that was the occasion of the passing of this Act came to an end, and shall then expire’. The Act gave the executive wide powers to regulate exports without any Parliamentary ...”

“... surrounding them. But some of them still lay awake at night, as Mary Rowlandson did, reflecting on her past torments and ‘the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us’.A sanitised version of the captivity narrative, shorn of Rowlandson’s reflections, became the official story of post-9/11 America, as constructed by its leaders: the American people would ...”

“... bring in a goddess among the characters: it revolts me. Then not unnaturally, as it seemed to me, her speech is the worst in the play: being an unreality she must talk unreal. Believe me, the Greek gods are a totally unworkable material; the merest frigidity, which must chill and kill every living work of art they are brought into… . [They ...”

“... its masthead: ‘Printed for and sold by DANIEL ISAAC EATON, Printer and Bookseller to the Supreme Majesty of the People, at the COCK and SWINE, No 74, Newgate Street’. But the third and fourth numbers (30 March and 6 April) carry on their last page a pointing finger and the advice: ‘Those who wish to promote the PHILANTHROPIST, by their assistance, will ...”

“... literacy by writing their names. One of the women, however, ‘had trouble gripping the pen with her flat, stubby thumb with no fingerprint, yet haltingly, she still managed to write her name’. Her thumb is ‘as flat as a spatula’. When a guest stares at it, astonished, the landlord ...”

“... statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put it, ‘and a new country’. This was not, he said, another of ...”

“... our poising of obscure desires, What Minotaur in irritable matched burnings Yearns and shall gore her intricate my fires. Haffenden has some useful remarks on the poems, not unlike those of the Granta reviewer on the play: they try to solve the contradictions between the world of science and the feeling of being human; in the circumstances of the late ...”

“... Anglicano Defensio Secunda, or Second Defence of the English People, which Barbara Lewalski, in her biography, oddly calls his ‘least attractive work’, Milton gives thanks to God chiefly for three reasons. The first, in George Burnett’s 1809 translation, is that I was born in those times of my country, when the effulgent virtue of its citizens ...”

“... no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the pubs closed on Good Friday in 1904, under the ...”

“... into my car with difficulty. My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it again.’While she enjoys certain kinds of complication (seating mourners correctly at a funeral, insulting someone with a second-class stamp, genealogy), my mother has an aversion to ...”

“... even though in the Iliad Agamemnon swears ‘by the greatest of oaths’ that he never went into her bed or slept with her (no Clintonesque reservations here, please), while Achilles calls Briseïs his darling wife, adding: ‘I loved her with all my heart though I had captured ...”

“... pristine newcomer, just a little fatter and rounder than the six Tunnel Boring Machines that dug her out, prepares for its rendezvous with the admired brickwork of Joseph Bazalgette’s overwhelmed Victorian outflow. Such imaginative solutions were required, at whatever the cost (in the end it was £4.3 billion), to reduce the horror of the raw sewage and ...”