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“... him in one or another species of white condescension Either he would have to reinforce the Uncle Tom figure smiling through his suffering in All God’s chillun and (repeatedly) Show Boat, or unwittingly valorise the sentiments of British Imperialism in the Korda brothers’ film of Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River. Then there was Othello, also written ...”

“... ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in the love-act and simultaneous orgasm, are passed down from master or mistress to hand-picked pupil in certain rare and long-delayed bouts of ...”

“... first successful literary weekly. It was founded not by a political faction but by a publisher, Henry Colburn, anxious to get exposure for his products. Colburn perceived the need for a newspaper whose news was books. The quarterlies’ ‘principle of selection’ was repudiated in favour of comprehensive coverage of the literature of the ...”

“... in Mr Grigson’s extracts. An analogous feeling comes through in a poem Mr Grigson does print, Henry Carey’s ‘Namby-Pamby’, which is in fact directed at one of Pope’s dunces (‘Namby-Pamby, pilly-piss, /Rhimy-pimed on Missy Miss’). The whole poem is an exuberant orchestration of the nagging sing-song of mocking children. It is blended with some ...”

“... a culinary context, was christening a kind of milk jelly ‘Maschler pudding’. This was because Tom Maschler, who had been her editor at Cape, turned down her latest novel at the end of the Sixties on the grounds that it was ‘the kind of thing people no longer wanted to read’. Barbara had no malice, but sharp in her novels and diary she wonderfully ...”

“... how to pray’ – and when discussing the right way to do things he’d bring in Shakespeare or Henry James. As he saw it, the modernist emphasis on technique was a reaction to a loss of the finer feelings that real art required, a loss caused chiefly by excessive frankness about sex. This threw an ennobling light on crime fiction: since love stories ...”

“... by his informal editorial panel, his publisher John Murray and the odd couple of John Sparrow and Tom Driberg. Sparrow was a grammarian pedant, ‘a great which-hunter’, as Murray put it, while Driberg watched the tenses and any surfeit of sentiment like a hawk. ‘If that’s what heaven’s like it won’t be bad’ was, for Driberg, rather ‘in the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... plenty to choose from – involves the Dallas banker who threw a lavish party, came dressed as Henry VIII and fed lion meat to his guests. Back in the mutinous 1960s, James Baldwin promised a ‘fire next time’. But the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver ...”

“... when Ernest Bevin was Foreign Secretary and Zionist forces were attacking the British. However, Tom Segev points out that the British Army, as it withdrew from Palestine a year later, was careful to hand over its main military bases to the Zionist forces even as it attempted to protect Jaffa’s Arabs from eviction. For Israel’s new historians, among them ...”

“... Friday, when this year Pontius Pilate is not the only one washing his hands.16 April. A card from Tom King with news of the tattoo of me that he had put on his arm (pictured in the Diary published in the LRB of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It ...”

“... study of screwball, Pursuits of Happiness (1981). Multimillionaire Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike (Henry Fonda) is beguiled twice over by a temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) whom he encounters for the first time as Jean, a con artist working a cruise ship, and then as Lady Eve Sidwich, guest of honour at a party thrown in the Pike family mansion in ...”

“... was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where ...”

“... history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall ...”