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“... to a pamphlet: a print-off of an address given by Quentin Bell in May 1976 – his fifth Gwilym James Memorial Lecture at the University of Southampton. I recommend the pamphlet, titled ‘A Demotic Art’. It told me, learnedly and amusingly, just what I wanted to know about the ‘coroplasts of Boeotia’. (The nearest my Shorter Oxford Dictionary comes ...”

“... Bodies and Put out more flags are skimped because he has dealt with them separately elsewhere, Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins are shrugged off as of little interest, which is all right with me. Brideshead Revisited receives 78 pages, while the others get about twenty each. Davis has also studied the circumstances under which they ...”

“... radicals. Although he belonged to a different branch of Whiggery from the more francophile Charles James Fox, Pitt too was a Whig. He never described himself as anything else, and had championed parliamentary reform during the 1780s. At Horne Tooke’s treason trial, the reformer claimed that he was only repeating what Pitt himself had said a decade ...”

“... that was more subtly responsive to local weather than any before or since. Norman Shaw, Baillie Scott and Philip Webb designed houses with central ‘living halls’, sociable spaces from which rooms led off, opening out in bay windows to take the inhabitants into the garden on the most inclement of days. Yet, Harris insists, ‘ivy clung thickly, all year ...”

“... of Gondar-based Ethiopia owed much to the travels of the Scottish ‘explorer’ James Bruce, who landed at Massawa in 1769, and reached Gondar in the following year. His visit was comparable in importance to that of Alvares a quarter of a millennium earlier, and those of the 17th-century Jesuits. Bruce was to become the author of a ...”

“... their moment of glory. Front of stage is initially given to such little-known figures as Dr James Stagg, the chief weatherman on whose forecasts everything rested. Faced with a mass of conflicting data (and many doubting colleagues), Stagg finally called it right, scrubbing 5 June for 6 June, thereby avoiding the worst ever Channel storm. Rommel, in ...”

“... thank it for that and ask no more of it.’ The Trevelyans were synthetic Border Whigs as Sir W. Scott was a synthetic Border Tory. It is doubtful whether the great families of Northumbria quite saw the Regius Professor and Cambridge master as the representative of landed tradition – the mask he wore in Cambridge. For one thing, his Tory acquaintance was ...”

“... place to look is the Introduction. OED2 reprints the Historical Introduction to the OED1 by C.T. Onions, which tells how the editors, headed by James Murray, relied on armies of volunteer readers. These readers worked through lists of titles provided for them by the editors, and recorded on slips of paper the words ...”

“... name of a dubious decorum. What was their relationship like? In a telling family memoir from 1867, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s nephew, described it thus: Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane’s side with a feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of ...”

“... meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ‘great ...”

“... to be done – such as rubbishing the Heseltine campaign for leader in 1990 – Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at ...”

“... by the Murdoch publications. It is this public he is addressing when he offers his views on Pope, Scott, Carlyle, Heaney, Larkin etc. These assumptions contribute powerfully to his excellence as a reviewer, but he has other gifts, equally important though less spectacular. He knows how to combine economical information about the book he is discussing with a ...”

“... of letters of intimacy of any nature, except for some love-notes to the rather alarmed Brian James, the Australian actor White fell for in 1963. There are no letters to his mother Ruth and none to Manoly, who faithfully burnt them. There are early letters to lovers and ex-lovers, but so many doors are closed to us that our view of the novelist is only ...”

“... of something before and beyond language. This is the concept of fantasy that allows Joan Scott in The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011) to investigate what is not captured by cultural construction, everything that eludes the conscious expression of ideas in language. By describing historical scripts about love as ‘fantasies’ Rosenwein seems to ...”

“... full version of the term, which has puzzled everybody, unduly I think. According to Liddell and Scott, the Greek ‘alektwr means ‘cock’, keraV, ‘horn’, ‘areskw, ‘to please’, and tauroV, of course, ‘bull’: hence the phrase means roughly ‘a horny cock pleasing to a bull’, reduced to ‘halek’ = ‘cock’. Forman’s Greek was ...”