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“... weird genealogies are disclosed. ‘Angus Wilson, the novelist, who bore a striking resemblance to Margaret Rutherford, the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the ...”

“... of your seemingly healthy Girton and Newnham Girls break down utterly. So, according to Grant Allen, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s, higher education could damage your health. More to the point, it interfered physically (not just, that is, by opening up wider and more attractive horizons than motherhood) with a woman’s capacity to bear ...”

“... as well as those of others mentioned by Luckhurst, such as Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee and Grant Allen. The concept of telepathy continually threatened to collapse distinctions between the literal and the figural, and the psychological and the metaphysical. As Luckhurst remarks, Henry James ‘always ensures the screw will bite with a further turn, the ...”

“... miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, speculated openly about coming in to work and finding tanks drawn up on Horse Guards Parade, his colleagues couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking. Was the UK on the brink of a left-wing revolution or a ...”

“... century, and for some time afterwards, who hadn’t received a classical education. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher, a scientist, was a rare exception; far more typical is Boris Johnson, who likes to quote great chunks of Ancient Greek from memory.In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul Betts, an American who experienced ‘Western ...”

“... afford it. You see, if we don’t rehearse, and if we don’t-a play, that runs into money. Margaret Dumont, most imperturbable of straight men, was the aristocratic foil to all the boys in Animal Crackers, and when the circus of Harpo reeled around her, or poked her with a stick, or got his foot caught in her sleeve, Dumont’s suffering was ...”

“... with the Pemberton-Billing trial. (Pemberton-Billing was sued for libel by the actress Maud Allen for publishing an article suggesting that a large number of her audience at the opening of Oscar Wilde’s Salome were German spies. Lord Alfred Douglas used the occasion of the trial to accuse Wilde’s friend Robert Ross of being the ‘leader of all the ...”

“... the beginnings of the epistolary novel in France or in England. Rightly observing that Walter Allen in The English Novel fails to trace the full lineage of fiction, she does not see how many of the male ancestors he omits with the women. Alive to the gaps in Ian Watt’s account as far as Aphra Behn et al are concerned, she seems oblivious of the fact ...”

“... Men. But their tenure was in jeopardy, because the owner of the land on which it stood, Giles Allen, was refusing to extend their lease, which was due to expire in April 1597. It was this imminent threat of eviction which brought Burbage to the Blackfriars in search of alternative accommodation for the company. He paid the owner of the former ...”

“... like Gone with the Wind.”’ O’Connor’s Georgia could hardly be further from the Tara of Margaret Mitchell. O’Connor has much fun mocking elegant diction and manners, and the Southern obsession with bloodlines: ‘I know you’re a good man,’ the Grandmother tells the psychotic Misfit, who is on the run from the federal penitentiary, in ‘A Good ...”

“... and Tide, the feminist magazine that published Delafield, first appeared. Its proprietor, Lady Margaret Rhondda, a peeress in her own right, campaigned energetically, albeit unsuccessfully, to be allowed to take her seat in the House of Lords. Hilda Matheson was 32 in 1920 and newly appointed political secretary to Nancy Astor. She appears on the cover of ...”

“... one for public consumption. When Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was completed, five years later, Allen Tate, Lowell and others gave its studied historicism and technical effects unqualified approval. Berryman’s reputation was made, but his best work was still to come. The poem involves a modern, gnostic poet, for whom nothing is more important than writing ...”

“... director-general, Karin von Hippel, was once chief of staff to the four-star American general John Allen. In 2021, RUSI’s second largest donor was the US State Department. (The largest was the EU Commission; BAE Systems, the British army, the Foreign Office and some other friendly governments account for most of the remaining funding.) IISS’s main funders ...”

“... editor of the London Magazine. He has written well-received biographies of Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane, and has already published three volumes of autobiography, the last entitled Grub Street Irregular. Now he has written a book which is, the blurb tells us, ‘both a riveting exercise in group biography and a masterly account of English society in the ...”

“... era which benefit from having such a clear-cut political situation and a ready-made villain – ‘Margaret Fucking Thatcher’ in Bill Nighy’s words – giving all three films the feeling of being a crusade while still being very funny. I’d like to have written any or all of them. As R. says, the 1980s was such a simple world and the villains so ...”