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“... and, despite Darwin, the natural world could be studied safely by the pious with the aid of Philip Gosse’s Evenings at the Microscope. Potter, with her brother’s microscope and the encouragement of her father, developed into an accomplished naturalist and botanical artist. It was the ideal childhood for a writer, intense, isolated and untrammelled ...”

“... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for memories ...”

“... had irresistible appeal. Linking the Biblical story of the baptism of the Ethiopian by Philip the Evangelist (Acts 8.27-40) with such texts as ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalm 68.31), they marked out an alternative tradition to the one which condemned them, as sons of Ham, to be perpetual ‘servants of ...”

“... a time that must seem remote from the present. Nothing testifies more strikingly to the truth in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘MCMXIV’ – though its terms are rather different, except perhaps for the reference to ‘dark-clothed children at play/Called after kings and queens’ – than Sorley’s letters. ‘Never such innocence again,’ indeed, so long as ...”

“... definition of the artless art of conversation. Others understood it more pragmatically. Gabriel Harvey, an ambitious Elizabethan policy wonk whose beautifully written marginalia offer some of the richest information we have about Early Modern ways of reading, annotated The Courtier in minute detail (his copy is now in the Newberry Library in that centre of ...”

“... the pool, hurting his back.’ The brace would keep the President upright for the bullets of Lee Harvey Oswald.Makes you wonder about the lighter side of Camelot. Here, at any event, is a suggestive minor-key connection between hubris and nemesis – or between Kennedy’s frantically sordid private life and the events that punctuated and then terminated his ...”

“... at one rehearsal. ‘Really,’ said the veteran of Holding Out the Apple: ‘Do you mean Plinth Philip or Plinth Charles?’ But I would guess now that it was Oedipus, though rated a failure with Gielgud somewhat out of place in it, that gave him a new lease of life. He has always been a self-conscious man, his shyness masked by a bubbling stream of ...”

“... case of 1956 (an abortive attempt to integrate the University of Alabama), on the paid informer Harvey Matusow (who named 244 persons as Communists ‘and later said he had “probably” testified falsely about “every one” of them’), Sayre moves on to the Hollywood blacklist. Here she draws on the reminiscences of a group of expatriate Americans she ...”

“... clinging to it.’ The department store is in decline these days, but it is still possible in Harvey Nichols or perhaps Fenwicks to have that sense of luxuriating in peace and freedom – if you like such shops. I like them for the reasons that some women and many men dislike them. There are rarely any windows to the outside. You navigate by departments ...”

“... of Evans’s ‘love and produce’. Evans is the ‘paleface’ to Mailer’s ‘redskin’ in Philip Rahv’s counter-position, or the ‘Christian’ to Mailer’s ‘Cannibal’, to invoke one of Mailer’s own titles borrowed from Moby-Dick. Consider race. Both writers place the question of black and white at the absolute centre of things. But whereas ...”

“... creating a sensation as a theatre critic, he’s as trim, sleek and transparently avid as Laurence Harvey on the make in Room at the Top, but more convivial and amused – an amiable shark. No one looks that eagerly young anymore. Two decades after his death, Tynan is still getting the star treatment, a rare thing for any writer; even rarer for a critic, whose ...”

“... this time. Hints had appeared in print, in the loquacious pamphlets of Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, but more damagingly precise were the reports of Government informers – a flourishing trade in the police-state atmosphere of late Elizabethan London. There are two key documents, generally referred to as the ‘Baines Note’ and the ...”

“... and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet ...”

“... in the personal gift of the monarch.When, in November 1947, the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip of Greece brought an array of royalties to London, Channon gave a dinner party at which the ten guests included the queens of Spain and Romania, even if neither then reigned in her country. ‘People gasped at the splendour which one rarely sees ...”

“... allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson have made a mess of things. Well, made a mess of a person, actually, turned him into pulp and sprayed him all over the inside of a car when Travolta’s gun went off. ‘You probably hit a ...”