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“... Diary 1959-60’, included in Hermit in Paris. It’s as if he had followed Humbert to Charlotte Haze’s house (Mexico is ‘a rich source of decorative furnishings’) and seen more than one of Humbert’s dreary watering places (‘America keeps its promises: there is the bar with its wall adorned with hunting trophies of deer and reindeer; in ...”

“... got the better of him, or as nothing more than a ‘mirror’ of his time. Pat Wheatley and Charlotte Dunn’s Demetrius the Besieger is the first biography written in English and the first comprehensive treatment of him in any modern language. (Wheatley is the primary researcher for the first half, Dunn for the second.) The product of their two ...”

“... what life is’; going further, it may be, than Woolf herself ever did in her fictions. Charlotte Brontë was perhaps like Woolf in seeing only what one might call the outside of these romances, given that she defined their writer as cold and passionless. If she had been these things, Jane Austen would probably not have spent a brilliant adolescence ...”

“... other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ...”

“... selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ‘Kubla Khan’. This sturdy attachment to Coleridge’s poem is not easy to ...”

“... clichés as well as a bizarre ‘Fragment, Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé’ (the assassins, respectively, of Henri IV and Jean Paul Marat), and a provocative subtitle – ‘Being Poems Found Amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who Attempted the Life of the King in 1786’. The editors suggest that, in spite of ...”

“... contrasts, especially among 19th-century writers. Think of Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens; Mrs Henry Wood and George Eliot; R.D. Blackmore and Thomas Hardy. All were equally popular when alive. Looking back at Scott’s heyday, G.K. Chesterton marvelled in 1904 at ‘the way in which a whole period can suddenly become unintelligible’. Watson offers a partial ...”

“... the most passionate in the world.’ Still, it is difficult for the reader to invest feeling in wood and strings, no matter how ardently they are described. Indeed, the description becomes increasingly baroque as it tries to animate the fetishised object at the centre of her tale. A similar burlesque energy propels the performers in Nights at the Circus and ...”

“... Schwitters. Here Smith is at her most Sebaldian: All round the room, balanced on broken lumps of wood, some on the broken-off legs of an old piano, are the greeny-blue-coloured sculptures of heads, beasts, indefinable shapes. They are lumpy, gritty looking. Something about them is strangely familiar. Kurt asks Daniel if he will have the kindness to put ...”

“... own mood. I went to the Kamo shrine. The dawn was beautiful; all it lacked was the singing of a wood thrush. Catching sight of some interesting trees at Kataoka, I wrote: While waiting For the bird to sing Shall I stand In the grove at Kataoka And feel the drops of dew? Unlike the imperial new-born, the translations in this volume are swaddled in ...”

“... of the ‘Sicilian fairy’, Caroline Crachami, only one foot, ten and a half inches tall; Gaby Wood wrote about her in the LRB (11 December 1997) and about the morbid fascination with freakery. It’s unclear whether the two skeletons will return to display when the museum is reopened. Byrne had wanted his body buried at sea to avoid Hunter’s ...”

“... exemplary character, the only Hanoverian never to take a mistress. Plumb describes his marriage to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (‘a dim, formidably ugly girl’) as rash and unwise, picturing him as ‘doggedly fulfilling his marital duties’ in breeding child after child. In fact, George came to love ...”

“... became exhibiting artists. Philip Reinagle trained both his sons and four of his daughters: Charlotte, Fanny, Harriet and Oriana Georgiana. (The painter and diarist Joseph Farington encountered ‘two or three’ of the Reinagle sisters in 1807 and noted their unsentimental approach to copying the Old Masters. ‘They work very quick, & said, “Picture ...”

“... confronts her destiny, with little to help her but courage and persistence – like any heroine of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot or Henry James. She makes her way with touching serenity through a country which is in a state of turmoil and ferment. Not at all ‘feminist’, but a striking statement of the cause feminists have at heart – and all the more ...”

“... combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired account of a grisly sacrificial wood, allegedly destroyed by Caesar in person, thereby overcoming his soldiers’ superstitious fears. Tacitus provides possibly the most striking image of all, as the army of Suetonius Paulinus halts on the shore facing the island of Mona (Anglesey), awed by an ...”