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“... can’t win, it seems. And while Lynn ridicules the hapless Cowley’s assertion that For whom the bell tolls had been used by the Russian armies in World War Two as a textbook of guerrilla warfare, he neglects to mention Fidel Castro’s claim, made to Kenneth Tynan and cited in Meyers, that ‘we took For whom the ...”

“... with other analogous predicaments. D’Aguiar himself takes as the epigraph to his introduction Stephen Dedalus’s description of Irish art from Ulysses, ‘The cracked lookingglass of a servant’ – a turn of phrase which Stephen immediately realises may be both apt and marketable. Dabydeen and all other poets who ...”

“... of public good.This defence had been long in gestation. The conservative jurist James Fitzjames Stephen had proposed it in his draft criminal code: ‘A person is justified in exhibiting disgusting objects, or publishing obscene books, papers, writings, prints, pictures, drawings, or other representations, if their exhibition or publication is for the ...”

“... The Latin Mass – ‘backs to the congregation, vestments, introibo ad altare dei. And the bell! The Sanctus!’ as Kinsella’s appalled Father General described it in Rome – is popular with the people of Kerry but Vatican II has called a halt to it. It’s become a vestigial, disreputable sacrament, like the power of my new acquaintance, the fallen ...”

“... Catherine of Lincoln, Maud of Canterbury, John Machon, Alyse Darcy, Alice Catour and Thomas Bell could be added those of Alexius and Andronicus Effomatus, Greek ‘workers of damask gold’ (drawn gold wire) in London; John of Cologne, a German immigrant working for Edward III in the 1330s; Giles Avenel of Brussels, who made pieces for the Black ...”

“... Mr Stephen is editing a little dictionary,’ a friend explained to a clergyman foolhardy enough to ask whether Leslie ‘did any writing’. The enterprise in question was the DNB, one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London ...”

“... and lived to see night fall.’ (That’s from Waugh’s Men at Arms.) Then the first image: Stephen Newman in his shorts, aged nine, on the ‘most exciting day’ of his life – a day spent in the fur storage depot in which his father looks after Marilyn Monroe’s mink. The sun follows him to a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford: ‘It was the summer the ...”

“... nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?’ So says Lady Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to her tutor Septimus Hodge. Her question was echoed a century after her (fictitious) life by ...”

“... Frederic Harrison once climbed Mont Blanc and found Leslie Stephen on the top. Not an improbable location for the encounter of two eminent Victorians: and they might equally have met in George Eliot’s drawing-room. Whereas Stephen was much the more distinguished mountaineer, Harrison probably knew George Eliot better: he helped her work out the legal plot of Felix Holt, a service for which she may have owed him more gratitude than we need to feel ...”

“... have caused no consternation among listeners who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. Nor, perhaps, would Forster’s own discomfort with the question of Sex, which played a large, complicated part in his own life: ‘You work it out,’ his essay goes on: ‘I can’t so well.’ Increasingly anguished by the implications of his ...”

“... on the Malecón, the seafront of the real Havana, festooned with logos for Burger King and Taco Bell. Was this a rare, unsentimental picture of what the Foundation imagined post-Castro? No, this was a positive view, Ninoska insisted. The artwork promoted a record by the Cuban singer Willy Chirino. He figures in Next Year in Cuba, an account by Gustavo ...”

“... shed a little of its ambiguous glamour over him, and at the same time he became a friend of Julian Bell, who invited him to Charleston. In 1931 the Woolfs, who had printed his first tentative book of poems, took him on as a dogsbody and part-time commercial traveller at the Hogarth Press. They had already run through two assistants, but, all the same, Wright ...”

“... Grigson. (It happened that the previous day a national newspaper had given publicity to my brother Stephen in some sensationally farfetched connection with Guy Burgess, John Lehmann and other names they hoped to involve.) ‘Ah that rings a bell,’ and significant looks passed between uniformed men at desks and with ...”

“... the Year. Out on her rounds on the Isle of Lewis last October, MacKenzie encountered a millworker, Stephen MacKay, who had nearly lost his arm in an industrial accident and was bleeding heavily. MacKenzie took him to her van, applied a tourniquet and called an ambulance. After saving MacKay’s life, MacKenzie finished delivering the post. It’s like an ...”

“... street different smell.’ Now ‘too’ has its force justified. On 568/648 Bloom and Stephen are reading the Evening Telegraph, Stephen the letter on page two from Mr Deasy about foot-and-mouth disease, Bloom an account of the third race at Ascot: While the other was reading it on page two Boom (to give him ...”