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“... So, too, the elaborate parallels and contrasts: Robert Walpole and Bolingbroke, Walpole and Henry Pelham, and, pervasively, Pitt against Newcastle. Behind this lies an ancient literary decorum: when Brooke observes, ‘Walpole’s correspondence is a record of his friendships; his memoirs and journals, of his hatreds,’ he points to the Ciceronian ...”

“... of animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of sublimation was involved in both ...”

“... and she was determined to keep her identity hidden, if not from London circles (her brother Henry couldn’t resist boasting), then at least from the circles she moved in. Propriety was a factor, of course, but she doesn’t appear to have been constrained by it. Her letters show that the money was useful and the success of the books ...”

“... the money that might have been spent on the Harvard education he declined. Guatemala led to Dark Green, Bright Red (1950), a novel about the way the US and the United Fruit Company went about furthering their interests in Central America. Vidal was quick to notice the consequences of the Cold War in the US, and the conformity he thought it inspired. Like ...”

“... John and his sister Gwen. They had come to London to study under the irascible but inspiring Henry Tonks and soon attracted a group of talented students around them. ‘Those Johns you know have a hold that never ceases,’ Ida wrote to a friend. She stayed for six years, working hard to be an artist and making friendships that lasted all her life. Among ...”

“... and stylised antinomies. Among the most familiar are Aristotle’s nature and convention, Sir Henry Maine’s status and contract, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Societas’ and ‘Universitas’, Durkheim’s ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity, and Hobbesian vertical ‘command’ models of authority ...”

“... in The Grapes of Wrath; the departing son is like those who have to leave their homeland in How Green Was My Valley or wander stateless like Ford’s Mary of Scotland and like every cowboy he put on the screen. The Quiet Man, a sentimental favourite with the Irish, promotes a central myth among tribes of that sort: the myth of the man returning home to ...”

“... Lime and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to ...”

“... the arrival and settlement in 1639 of a band of Puritans under the leadership of the Reverend Henry Whitfield. State and local authorities have legislated for the preservation of numerous buildings, four districts and the town green: there are five museums in historic houses; an energetic preservation alliance; and ...”

“... the cawing of seagulls so well that he can translate poetry into it, and notes that the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are particularly suited to this purpose. Reviling the culture of ownership, Gould feels ‘out of joint with the rest of the human race’. He dresses in the cast-off clothes of his friends. On winter days he stuffs an insulating layer ...”

“... death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly Review. It is here that we find the first modern expression in print of the conviction that Piero was an artist of the first rank. We can be ...”

“... Communists known as the ‘White Terror’, launched in collaboration with the city’s underworld Green Gang. Showing the self-interested flexibility that marked his long career, Chiang then allowed his hoodlum associates to turn on the businessmen in a wave of extortion and kidnapping that provided a flow of funds to the government he established in ...”

“... couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large Glass. At this time, too, together with Paolozzi and Henderson, Hamilton began to haunt natural history museums, to comb through glossy ...”

“... Lord Percy in Blackadder, whose alchemical pursuits engender not gold but a nugget of purest ‘green’, Morton had made some ‘black’.Successful alchemists tend to be fictional. Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist (1988) is a meditation on following your dream. His alchemist really can turn lead into gold, using the fabled philosopher’s stone: an ...”

“... from every corner of the earth. The very best ironies live their lives inside other ironies. Henry VIII changed his relationship with the Catholic Church so as to enable himself to marry his chosen bride. (Sadly, something happened to her.) Five hundred years later, Prince Charles changes the date of his wedding to his chosen bride so as to attend the ...”