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“... Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh ...”

“... Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only. Raw Material indeed), Stefan Themerson, and (coming) John Wheway (stand by): and if only Heathcote Williams would write a novel’. In 1968 Penguin published Writing in England ...”

“... style means that you have something to hide. This implication is clear in such writings as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader over Your Shoulder, Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, and Orwell’s several essays on language and its consequences. Crick names four of these essays: ‘The Prevention of Literature’, ‘Writers and ...”

“... with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in the media, had already rumbled the Wordsworths. ‘Wordsworth and his sister,’ he was later to observe ‘who pride themselves on having no selfishness, are of all ...”

“... the fact came out. On the opening of the trial, the distinguished counsel for the defence, Jeremy Hutchinson QC, visited the court to obtain a sight of the panel. In a casual conversation with a court officer Lord Hutchinson learned that – more than two months before – the prosecution had applied privately to a judge in ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide ...”

“... MacSweeney’s first book, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, was published by Hutchinson New Authors in 1968 with an acid pink/red/green/purple laminated cover and a winning photograph of the poet, which immediately fused with one’s idea of Eric Burdon, the other Tyneside beauty of the moment. The poems were good, too: this was the New ...”

“... were ‘the heirs of Swift, Berkeley and Grattan’. Not quite: he cited Burke, Grattan, Swift, Robert Emmet and Parnell, but not Berkeley. On Mahaffy: it may be that McDowell, who joined with W.B. Stanford to write the life of Mahaffy, has tired of the man, but the account of him in the present book makes him appear tawdry and obvious. His views on the ...”

“... including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother, Mary, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, had been a Bloomsbury hostess and a model for Matisse. Barbara had married the Greek painter Nico Ghika. The women were acquaintances rather than friends, but over lunch they shared details of their ...”

“... year or two of the originals. Already, too, there is no question of comparable English authors – Robert May, William Rabisha – being translated in the reverse direction. Yet at this period the connections between cookery and other arts and crafts could still be noticed without undue self-consciousness. Pepys and Evelyn may well have discussed with each ...”

“... faulty passages, but I know of no poet in any language who has written so much that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the ...”

“... in the blurb to his book as ‘Visual Arts Marketing Officer at the Welsh Arts Council’, and by Robert Hutchison, who ‘worked for five years as a Senior Research and Information Officer for the Arts Council’ and who seems on the way to elevating arts administration into one of the arts. Besides recording with disapproval that ‘it is, for the most ...”

“... in particular, the indifference that greeted Blunden’s selection in 1954, published by Hutchinson, and also Leonard Clark’s Chatto selection of 1973, for which Clark himself put up some of the money. It’s true that Blunden, thinking his own poems didn’t fit the fashions of the early Fifties, tried to second-guess the reviewers by making an ...”

“... seems never to have flagged. He had other friendships – for example, with Brigid Patmore, Mary Hutchinson and Sydney Schiff, people less involved in the literary struggle, and perhaps for that reason recipients of some of his most interesting letters. All in all, he seems to have made himself as much at home as it was in his nature to be. Yet the letters ...”

“... a well-to-do Anglo-Irish gentleman, Otho Holland Lloyd, and a former governess, Clara ‘Nellie’ Hutchinson, whose origins are obscure but who was certainly born illegitimate. They were married in 1884, just a month after Otho’s sister Constance married Oscar Wilde. (Cravan’s claim to be ‘the grandson of the queen’s chancellor’ – one of his ...”