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“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... be made to fight for anyone. Every telling puts a different spin on it, implicitly inviting the teller, the listener or the commentator to moralise. Although the word is often used nowadays to designate an idea (particularly a wrong idea), a myth most certainly is not an idea. It is a narrative that makes possible any number of ideas, but that does not ...”

“... Hamish McIlwraith), angst (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers), the limits of reason (Edward de Bono, The Five-Day Course in Thinking). The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do drive in Western culture is indeed ancient, and has surprisingly widespread roots. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is Melissa Bank’s first book. It comes to Britain from ...”

“... Arthur Benson​ never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ...”

“... but also his spokesperson or his accomplice, then the question of what these tales and their teller seem to want becomes more tangled – especially when we take relationships outside Wonderland into account. Robinson Duckworth, who helped to row the boat when Carroll first told the story of Alice to her ten-year-old namesake in 1862, recalled that ...”

“... sister, Laura, conspired that they would both marry young, especially after a gypsy fortune-teller had proffered assurances that Margot was destined to be the wife of a prime minister. Laura’s turn came first. In 1885, she married Alfred Lyttelton, Gladstone’s dashing nephew. The following year, she died in childbirth. Margot would surely have ...”

“... the trials: Andrew Bogle, a Black man who grew up enslaved in Jamaica. There he became the page of Edward Tichborne (uncle to the missing Sir Roger), who was the manager of the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos’s plantations around Kingston. During the trials Bogle persistently restated his belief that the Claimant was the real Sir Roger Tichborne. Eliza (who ...”

“... Edward Said first met Daniel Barenboim by chance, at the reception desk of the Hyde Park Hotel in June 1993; Said mentioned he had tickets for a concert Barenboim was playing that week. They began to talk. Six years later, in Weimar, they dreamed up the idea of a summer school in which young musicians from the Arab world and from Israel could play together ...”

“... debate of ‘Winner and Waster’. ‘Luke thi knave hafe a knoke bot he the clothe spred,’ says Edward III to Waster: Gouberville would have agreed. He would also have sympathised strongly with Waster’s claim that large feasts are good for poor people, who always get a share, and been unmoved by Winner’s condemnation of giant meals running from ...”

“... non-prescriptive approach: for it must have been what inspired the ‘composite’ biography by Edward Nehls of thirty years ago, in which the biographer stood aside and allowed the torch of narrative to be handed on from one to another of a relay of competing voices. This seems to raise some fundamental questions about biography, or at least literary ...”

“... is ‘where life flows’, as well as with that of Lawrence himself: trust the tale and not the teller. It is not the tale which absorbs one here, however, so much as the closeness and richness of experience that comes fizzing out of words and pages. Lawrence’s message, and even his insight into this classic Oedipal situation, have become as a tale that ...”

“... best left to newspapers: the role of the radio news bulletin was to encourage people to buy them. Edward Stourton recounts that one broadcast began: ‘Good evening, today is Good Friday. There is no news.’ By the mid-1930s, however, the BBC had set up a small news department as part of its burgeoning bureaucracy. It employed no reporters – news items ...”

“... John Minton. You can smell the wild garlic, the turpentine. Rustic excesses out of David Rudkin or Edward Bond, scythe-carrying yokel mobs baying for blood, are intercut with a Paul Nash vision of the falling German aircraft (‘insignia painted on the wing-tips’) in a clear blue sky, black smoke over the green-houses. A poetic that is reliant on a system of ...”

“... stretch out so lowd …/So that I truly thought all These/Came to see Shore [Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV] or Pericles.’ On the page, as well as the stage, Pericles flourished: there were six typically error-stuffed quartos by 1635 (the first, of 1609, spelled Marina’s name incorrectly on the title page, and muddled verse with prose), meaning Pericles ...”

“... the vixen between the two trees, unceremoniously rapes her. This conclusion resonates, for the teller of the tale is not some anonymous spear-carrier sweating Dutch courage, but the blacksmith Ignat, whose subsequent death in battle will exemplify the redemption of the artisanal class through sacrifice. Alexander hangs around long enough to confirm the ...”