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“... bankers or lawyers or psychiatrists don’t have? In what sense is writing a profession? Birkin, Lord Jim, Lewis’s Tarr are all men of uncertain worldly status. (One of the characters asks of Tarr: ‘What sort of prizes could he expect to win by his professional talents? Would this notable arriviste be satisfied?’) They are the kind of people, one might ...”

“... contemporaries) but not parents, appetites but not political ideals, ambitions but not hope. In Lord of the Flies the boys were on an island. In Ellis’s novels, at least up until Lunar Park, there has been no elsewhere – other than oblivion. And the violence was the route to this longed-for oblivion (the violent acts function as malign forms of ...”

“... His answer is historical: Hamlet is James I, his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, whose husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered eight months after James’s birth in 1566. Three months after Henry’s death she married the man suspected of being his murderer, James Hepburn. The play was a success because, Critchley and Webster suggest, everyone knew it was the ...”

“... Its drays, loaded with casks and drawn by shire horses which also did a stint pulling the lord mayor’s coach, were still on the streets when we moved there in the 1960s. They won’t return. But troops of horses of the Household Cavalry, which woke us when we lived off Portobello Road, can still be encountered on their early morning journeys across ...”

“... because she was a replica of her ill-fated kin, a relic of the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad ...”

“... a job on t’lorries, A Transcontinental Ford. E felt reet good in t’cabin. E felt like a bloody Lord. E’d bin a bit of a mardy, Angin on t’old dear’s skirt. E didn’t like folks shoutin, Or scraps wi lads, or dirt. E’d watch is dad trough offal – Trotters, liver, tripe – Or pigeon scraped from t’by-pass, Or rabbit, ung an ripe, An all ...”

“... Some good places for looking at pictures retain the feel of the private houses they once were (the Phillips Collection in Washington, or Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge), but there are no rules – re-hangings at the Tate gave new life to pictures which seemed to have lost heart, just by putting them in the right company ...”

“... Gunter’s house over against Temple gate’, crossed the Thames to watch a play performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s men – Shakespeare’s company, though we cannot say whether he was among the performers – at the Globe Theatre. On the previous day, or possibly the day before that, a group of them had approached ‘some of the players’ and asked them ...”

“... by much mutual rubbing in of embrocation afterwards) may well have been – as Jock Phillips suggests writing of 19th-century New Zealand, but with a sidelong glance at the English public schools – a source of comforting closeness in a society where women were scarce or marginalised and the taboo against homosexuality was strong. The binding ...”

“... In 1883, a Mr Wendell Phillips Garrison of New York published a travel narrative called What Mr Darwin Saw on his Voyage around the World, a narrative that follows pretty closely Darwin’s own line and Darwin’s own words, or at least the less intellectually taxing of Darwin’s own words. In a remarkable preface Garrison suggests that the text contains all a child needs at every stage of its education: a well-conducted parent could match the level of difficulty with the child’s evolving ability, telling the story in simple numbers for the babe in arms or on the knee, in greater detail for the toddler and schoolchild, until the grown student gets the undiluted works ...”

“... life savings. This is a crime that cannot be forgiven. Rick’s ambition is that his son will be Lord Chief Justice – ‘handing down the sentences that had once been handed down to Rick in the days we never owned to’. In fact, Magnus becomes not a dispenser of justice but a virtuoso of dishonesty. In this he remains his father’s son. Working for the ...”

“... of all kinds. He attacked his mother’s prime ministers for their sartorial shortcomings: Lord Rosebery was rebuked for dressing like an American and Lord Salisbury for attending the queen wearing the trousers of an Elder Brother of Trinity House (Salisbury had to apologise: he had been preoccupied by ‘some ...”

“... Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza – then chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, then established Phillips de Pury, which he hoped would ‘turn the auction house duoply that was Sotheby’s and Christie’s into a triumvirate that included myself’. ‘Courting Medicis is now what I do,’ he writes, ‘and every week seems to bring a trip to ...”

“... I don’t say good reasons’). He looked back with particular nostalgia to his time as the Lord Northcliffe Professor at University College London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So why did he then move to Cambridge? ‘Vanity, I expect; ignorance. Terrible mistake, obviously.’ He was an accomplished moaner, or mock-moaner, and his time as ...”

“... John Fisher for ‘R.P. Johannes Phischerius’. Foreign, too, is the Anglican ring of ‘My Lord Bishop’ (for ‘Reverendissime Praesul’). Saddest of all, that syncretism which led pious Renaissance Christians to apply to God the revered titles of Antiquity disappears without a trace. ‘Christ our Saviour’ really is desperately far from ...”