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“... aahing, sentimental and nostalgic, with every mention of black Levis worn with Doctor Martens, of Peter Frampton and Art Gartfunkel, of homebrew wine at the parents’ house and fancy wine when you get invited round by old college friends who have done much better for themselves than you have. In an earlier draft of this article, I tried to construct a little ...”

“... a desire to save my soul.’ Four scholars were invited to reply to Coetzee – Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Barbara Smuts and Wendy Doniger – and all of them struggled in different ways to read his meanings. Singer seemed to suggest that Coetzee’s device was fundamentally evasive. ‘It’s a marvellous device, really. Costello can blithely criticise ...”

“... the 5th Earl Russell defied most conventional stereotypes of the aristocrat. But he possessed a keen awareness of his dynastic heritage: it determined both his sense of political obligation and his interpretation of English history. The story of the Russells was inextricably interwoven with the history of Whiggery and Liberalism, and after some early ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... out to be more fickle than science allows for. Milton has been advised by his chiropractor friend Peter Takakis, who is around for the family’s traditional Sunday afternoon open-house debating session, that – since male sperm swim faster than female sperm – a couple, to have a baby girl, ‘should have sexual congress 24 hours prior to ovulation’. The ...”

“... the shape of another world.’She also brought the fabric of other worlds into the square. She was keen on embroidered Chinese gowns and Paris frocks: ‘I certainly feel there is something radically wrong with my clothes from an academic point of view.’ Shuddering away from the ‘cabbage wallpaper and horsehair sofas’ of her Victorian relatives, she ...”

“... Sayers tried the same trick in The Documents in the Case, her only crime novel not featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but it was her least successful book: too many competing voices drowned out the plot. (Van Dine’s 16th rule: ‘A detective novel should contain … no literary dallying with side-issues … They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant ...”

“... Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. (It’s a nice touch that the affair gets a mention in her 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. Wimsey himself had clearly been following it keenly.) The dishevelled, corduroy-clad communist Pollard has more than a whiff of Le Carré about him: in one ...”

“... front’.Carey is excellent at sketching biographies, quoting judiciously and generously, and keen to be explanatory without being patronising: you can see in the use of anecdote and analogy the experience of years lecturing to drifting undergraduates. (The Elizabethans fretted about whether or not they were damned, he explains at one point, rather like ...”

“... of caviar are available all year round.‘People are gaining more confidence in sushi,’ said Peter Morrison, Manager, Trading Division. ‘We have joined forces with very credible traders such as Yo! Sushi and we aim to educate customers by bringing them here.’ Alison handed me a cup of liquid grass from the fresh juice bar, Crussh. There was something ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... Cup and the Lucina Cup – the press had a heyday celebrating ‘a new type of river girl … keen-eyed and close-shingled’, ‘Miss M.B. Carstairs, foremost motorboat enthusiast in Britain’.These triumphs, though spectacular, were relatively short-lived. In 1928 Carstairs commissioned an exorbitantly expensive speedboat, the Jack Stripes, which she ...”

“... our understanding of how F1 was produced – W.W. Greg, Charlton Hinman and their living heir, Peter Blayney – ever owned a copy. The current respective valuations placed on F1 and on the labour of those who study it, indeed, make painfully obvious the independence of the Folio’s price from the scholarly industry on which West implies its value partly ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... in fact it was Duncan Grant, who lived with her mother, but generally slept with men and wasn’t keen on acting as an authority figure. Angelica retreated into an affair with the much older Garnett, who – and this is where it begins to sound like you’re making things up – had been Duncan’s lover when Angelica was born. ‘Its beauty is the remarkable ...”