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“... Bernard and Mary Berenson at Villa I Tatti; the authors Janet Ross and Violet Paget (penname Vernon Lee); and streams of summer visitors including Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West. Though isolated from other children, and oppressed by a ‘long and dreary dynasty’ of governesses, her childhood ‘was not unhappy; it was merely ...”

“... deceased. The sort of soulless toiling employment you might see advertised at the back of the LRB. Vernon Lee seeks drab amanuensis. Nadia Boulanger requires tubercular page-turner of no discernible charm. Edith Sitwell seeks horsefaced girl to dribble-drabble around the scullery at Renishaw. Yes, of course: it irked me to be (yet again) Lady Terry the ...”

“... days I think Peter might just have liked Jeremy Hardy but would have drawn the line at Stewart Lee. 19 July. Depressed by the latest government privatisation as the NHS-owned company supplying safe blood plasma is sold off to a US firm which is ultimately owned by Mitt Romney and so likely to be asset-stripped and disposed of. The clowns who have come up ...”

“... there is a politics beneath the scandal-mongering of Washington Babylon, but whereas Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, the gossip columnists who wrote Washington Confidential, served the McCarthyite Right, Washington Babylon’s militants spread gossip for the populist Left. Cockburn and Silverstein personalise politics to underline the gap between an ...”

“... success. True to form on this second visit it was Isherwood who already had a date lined up: Vernon, ‘a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent with very sexy legs’. From that out-of-the-body vantage-point he shares with God and Norman Mailer, Isherwood looks down on himself and his friend:Yes, my dears, each of you will find the person you ...”

“... hews to his excellent Victorian predecessor, just compare their all-but-identical dealings with Vernon Lee’s book as a whole. And to register some of the odd consequences of a 1990 book which battens on an 1887 one, consider the ironical dedication by Byron to the renegade Southey. It made cultural sense for Wheatley, in a Victorian world endemically ...”

“... history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with Soul. Along the way, that history has appropriated the music on behalf of a white audience by perpetuating the ...”

“... into 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 ...”

“... Whitmer puts it in The Inner Elvis (1996), ‘there was a history to the emptiness that flawed Vernon’s character and created the subsequent psychological hole in Elvis’s personality. Both the lack of and the need for a father figure seemed to be a Presley family tradition.’ Vernon Presley struck his neighbours as ...”