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“... attitude towards her heroine adopted by such right-royal writers of an earlier generation as Roger Fulford. And she is no less critical of the condescending tone that characterised Aspinall’s highly selective edition of Mrs Jordan’s letters, which also unduly influenced subsequent writers (notably Brian Fothergill) who depended on them. Above ...”

“... and Heraclitus, and in Hölderlin, Hegel and Marx, and in James Hogg, is imparted to the young ones. He is the sort of Sixties dominie who keeps saying ‘fuck’ in class and inveighing against the system. His relationship with the kids is one between equals, but they also seem to expect him to be a wise man, and this is what he sometimes expects of ...”

“... anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ‘Golden Journey’. Interesting ...”

“... to describe these as they might have appeared to a forward-looking monk who had been a disciple of Roger Bacon, and therefore believed in machines and science, and a friend of William of Ockham, and was therefore opposed to the multiplication of beings (and signs), sceptical of universals, a sort of proto-semiotician but also a common-sense ...”

“... is about how I was saved by language.’ This is an explanation as deceptive as any given to the young protagonist. Indeed, there are moments when the reader feels that the author comes closer to being damned by a self-indulgent infatuation with words. There is a preciousness to many passages, a quality of the ‘set-piece’ and of an over-contrived ...”

“... was born in 1872, the son of a professor of medicine in Gröningen. The young man studied Sanskrit, taking his doctorate in 1897, and his idiosyncratic path from there to the European Middle Ages shaped what he did when he arrived. Dutch history had only begun in earnest in the 16th century, so that Holland was late in producing ...”

“... his miserable, alcoholic married life – though his misery is now tempered with love for his two young boys and a grudging respect for his wife. At Last, the latest instalment of Patrick’s ‘perpetual crisis’, resembles the first three novels rather than its predecessor, in both its studiedly glib two-word title and its short time-span. It covers one ...”

“... that his name provided cover during the 1980s for a Tory critique of Thatcherism. High Tories like Roger Scruton, for whom the priority of laissez-faire doctrine signalled a betrayal of authentic conservatism, invoked Burke as a counterweight to Thatcher’s reading – or misreading – of Friedrich von Hayek. Thatcher’s philosophical hero was, by a further ...”

“... lies in its anatomy of 18th-century portraiture under various heads: portraits of children, of young girls, of men of learning, of military and professional men, of actors and of women. None of these could be termed a neglected area, yet Wind constantly illuminates well-worn issues. He re-animates the tired exercise of comparing and contrasting Reynolds ...”

“... for Anthony Blunt, who was giving a lecture tour for the Council in Greece, to meet and assess young men (‘That one’s rather jolly,’ ‘I rather like that one over there’) and sometimes paid them on his behalf, a part of the proceedings about which Blunt displayed great delicacy. He has nothing detailed or penetrating to say about the politics of ...”

“... Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside the Slade lay open. Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled ...”

“... birth certificate, ran away with the father’s chauffeur, Cesare Romati, when the boy was still young, and so his only memory of the divine Ada was of an unknown woman appearing ‘at the top landing, the voile of her beautiful gown floating behind her as she descended the stairs’. He was raised by a governess whom he called, with the callousness of ...”

“... maybe a conviction, as Evans has it, that ‘almost nothing any adult did for him when he was young did him any good.’ He saw abroad as a merciful place to be – the lost parts of Spain, Yemen, North Africa, Arabia – and the quality of his writing attests to the degree of his wonder at leaving home. Lewis, Evans writes, was ‘an escapist by reflex ...”

“... In​ 1966, a young writer named Patrick Modiano published his first short story, a satire set in a summer concentration camp called ‘Saint-Tropez-Ravensbrück’. Surrounded by ‘charming Kapos’, the inmates – ‘children of Himmler and Coca-Cola’ – are lulled into submission by LSD and hedonism. Paris’s leading artists and intellectuals praise the camp; Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film ...”

“... an 18-year-old schoolboy waiting to go up to Oxford, proposed to Gladys Baldwin, the pretty young typist he’d first seen playing tennis only three weeks before. Gladys (who later came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and ...”