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“... in the state in which he possessed and left them.’The presence of a one-volume collection of Henry More’s Philosophical Poems, Platonic Song of the Soul (‘fine copy, gilt edges’) and a ‘good sound copy’ of Speght’s 1598 Chaucer added to the collection’s value. But so, paradoxically, did the battered condition of the other books. Lamb’s ...”

“... mail-order catalogue, whose pages they have only just begun to turn. But, like Jay Gatsby’s green light, their artificial paradise is destined to remain a promise of the future, a narcissistic fantasy. For all Perec’s stylistic sangfroid one can detect in this prose the shadow of a master whom he did not mention in his Warwick lecture: the inventor of ...”

“... with anyone but other educated Punjabi-speaking Hindu Jats’, she borrows money for a forged Green Card. The Professor is not a professor: he splits human hair into batches in a basement under the Khyber Bar BQ. Her new job is as ‘caregiver’ or ‘day-mummy’ to Duff, the adopted daughter of Taylor and Wylie, liberal New York achievers. The ...”

“... of proper Scotland than could ever be accomplished by laws, statesmen or associations,’ wrote Henry Cockburn. After Scott’s death, the most significant literary figure in Edinburgh was not a Scotsman, but the reclusive Thomas de Quincey. Mr Royle treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great magazines – as a friend of ‘Christopher ...”

“... instantly mythologised, as it were, and communicated to the sympathetic reader. When Prince Henry was christened, what poet but Hughes would have been inspired to dash off a ‘Rain-Charm’, celebrating a downpour that ended a drought, and set the salmon free to leap up over West Country weirs? The splendid poem chants a liberation of rivers – the ...”

“... his bedazzled readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He ...”

“... were soldiers in the British Army, holding uppity views on mutiny, sedition and the wearing of the green. They duly get their come-uppance in one story at the hands of the good Irishman Mulvaney. Kipling’s view was that the British Empire stood together, solid in all its parts, its model the Roman Empire, where the legions would take any barbarian who would ...”

“... point out that Scott was commissioned to undertake the restoration of the cathedral because Henry Clutton, who had originally been appointed and had done the Chapter House (assisted by William Burges, experimenting with colours), rendered himself ineligible by converting to Catholicism.Had Clutton continued, the cathedral would be a building rather ...”

“... its grip on the population: real people, slipping off the face of that lovely ground, leaving the green – pleasant lands of Northumberland to be nearer the belly – catch scraps with the shit we set out so grudgingly on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude. What makes poetry like this so inhospitable is, ironically, its radical ...”

“... of national prosperity. A ragged girl in a Midlands nail factory was interviewed by Richard Henry Horne. She did not, he reported, ‘know what a country dance is, was never at a dance in her life; never saw a dance; never heard of Harlequin and Columbine; has no idea what they are like.’ Horne, peculiarly, is recalling pantomime conventions that were ...”

“... Master George’s ‘progress in learning I can scarcely say too little’. His father, George Henry Moore, a successful racehorse owner and politician, was convinced his eldest son was a dunce and took the time-honoured step of attempting to browbeat him into an Army career. Moore junior balked at the discipline of military training college and was ...”

“... modern sense of receipts, or texts received: ‘Fine Sauce for a roasted Rabbet: used to king Henry the eight’; ‘To comfort the heart, and take away Melancholy’; ‘To make red sealing Waxe’; ‘Marmalad of Quinces’; ‘To make Oile of Earth wormes … good for the sinews that are cold’; ‘To bake a Capon with yolks of Eggs’; ‘To know ...”

“... desert, with figures trudging towards a horizon of seemingly limitless waste. Here the language of Henry Moore’s truncated nudes reverberates with visions of ruined, pharaonic colossi. ‘The Beloved of the Sayyidah’ by Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (c.1950) Henein and his fellow rebels were utopian dreamers, and sexual freedom too was part of their ...”

“... of the Mass, illustrated with a woodcut image of the Crucifixion hand-coloured in red, blue and green – and another on the facing woodcut of God the Father Enthroned wearing a papal tiara, this slash many leaves deep. Like lots of Catholic books in mid-Tudor England, this book carries the scars of Protestant anger, but it is also a deeply ambiguous ...”

“... at the gardens then to Daylesford Organic Farm Shop for lunch. The colour scheme is that greyish green one was first conscious of 40 years ago when Canonbury and Islington took it up and then the National Trust: ‘tasteful green’ it might be called (it’s the colour of the coalhouse door in Yorkshire). It’s a ...”