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“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... on slave labour imported from Africa. In a chapter on the development of the Caribbean islands, Richard Sheridan underestimates the role of slave labour. ‘The New World plantation represented the capitalistic exploitation of land,’ he writes, ‘with a combination of African labour, European technology and management, Asiatic and American ...”

“... where they could be attacked by the Ripper. One of the most compelling suggestions in Michael Mason’s The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (1994) concerns 19th-century attitudes to prostitution. Previous historians had stressed that the Victorians regarded prostitution as a sink of corruption and disease to be treated, like open sewers, by sanitary ...”

“... light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray happily declared the very attitudes to poetic diction that Wordsworth was later to detect and condemn. ‘The language of the age is never the language of poetry,’ he observed. By which he meant that it never should be. ‘Our poetry ...”

“... creditable. And here figure Mairi MacInnes, Miriam Levine (two), Gerry Loose, Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon ...”

“... counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and torture; despite, according to legend, being interrogated by Richard himself. ‘Thou servest for moonshine in the water a beggarly fugitive,’ ...”

“... landscape of death’. In 1637, two forces of English soldiers, one led by Captain John Mason and drawn from settlements in what is now Connecticut, and the other from the Massachusetts Bay Colony under Captain John Underhill, surrounded and fired on a stockaded Pequot village on the Mystic River, while their Narragansett and Mohegan auxiliaries ...”

“... them? In the course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”

“... some of them lazily written but four of them, at least, rather good. Three of the four are by Richard Usborne, the king of the traditional Wodehouse buffs. The other is by Benny Green, the new broom. Oxford University and the Pierpont Morgan Library are both relevant to Wodehouse’s life. He did not attend a university, though he would have liked to: but ...”

“... might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows ...”

“... conspicuous if not the most talented writer ever to live in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her household at Mason Croft, the grand building on Church Street that now houses the Shakespeare Institute, included not only her lesbian partner but a gondolier, brought from Venice with his boat to chauffeur them elegantly up and down the Avon.Did Corelli really believe that ...”

“... Cambridge. On parade (on King’s Parade in fact) just after ten, where the calming presence of Richard Lloyd Morgan, the chaplain of King’s, waits to shepherd me to the Senior Common Room. It’s already crowded with dons, some, since it’s the university sermon, presumably heads of houses.* I manage to avoid a chat by settling into a corner to con my ...”

“... Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s Sermons on the Boyle Foundations, George Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles, Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism, Matthew Hale’s Primitive Origination of Mankind, William Camden’s Remains, Newton’s Optics and works by Sir Kenelm ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”