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“... to procure its effects. That book contains an epigraph and gains a title from the Eliot poem about Webster – a dramatist, like the author of detective fiction, much possessed by death. Friction and mystery, in a spot abundant in macabre associations, contribute to a full-blown atmosphere. A flighty or insouciant view of death (an option available to the ...”

“... No longer will scholars use OED in the same way that Scrabble players use the Shorter Oxford and Webster, as a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and ...”

“... and contemplating (over a game of billiards) the seduction of the chaste Lady Frances Wedder-burn Webster, while he confided in Lady Melbourne, suavest of older women, about both. The love of women hardly bothers Byron in his last months. His messages even to Teresa Guiccioli, the last attachment, are terse postscripts added to letters she was receiving from ...”

“... and barrow interment which even so contained a pair of baptismal spoons, marked ‘Saul’ and ‘Paul’ to indicate conversion. The hoard, then, could easily have been part of Penda’s winnings, looted indiscriminately from his Christian neighbours, whether British or Anglo-Saxon. If we take the speculation further, it could well have been hidden after ...”

“... added physiognomical principles to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 ...”

“... Tooley stepped down in 1988 he’d been with the House since 1955, first as assistant to David Webster, the Liverpool department-store manager who’d built it up from its wartime use as a dance-hall, and then for 18 years as general director. The high point of Webster’s reign was the Georg Solti era (1961-71). Tooley ...”

“... One of the fascinations of Mariani’s book is the idiosyncrasy of Crane’s reading life: Donne, Webster, Marlowe, Laforgue (Eliot’s reading list); a passion for Vaughan, Traherne, Blake, Whitman; an immediate recognition of Stevens as the great contemporary poet. For all the frenzy and despondency of his life there was always the surety of his ...”

“... and it’s good to welcome this reprint of Johnson’s first edition (1755). No dictionary before Webster’s Third International has caused so much comment and controversy, none has been the cause of so many anecdotes and myths, as Johnson’s. Few dictionaries have been so misunderstood and misrepresented. In The American Language H. L. Mencken says ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”

“... He, too, was acquitted, along with two of Brooks’s executives, Fergus Shanahan and Geoff Webster, who signed off the payments. Jurors returned further not guilty verdicts on the royal editor Duncan Larcombe and his ‘eyes and ears’ at Sandhurst, Sergeant John Hardy, who received £23,700 between 2006 and 2008, including £5000 for a photo (it has ...”

“... sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and body, he was ...”

“... Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly grossness of Merrymakers at Shrovetide plunges us straight into the world of the plays themselves. The analogy is suggested by Taylor in an ...”

“... offered the inspiration for ‘Pierre Menard’ than his father’s vain request. The book was Paul Valéry’s Introduction à la poétique. Williamson writes: ‘The same text, according to Borges, could mean different things to different readers in different periods, and he quoted a line from a poem by Cervantes to show that a reader in the 20th century ...”