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“... this numinous figure has recently been designated ‘the peak performer’ in a detailed study by Charles Garfield, a former world-class weight-lifter who went on to receive a doctorate in clinical psychology. Leaving the rats to his behaviourist colleagues, Dr Garfield went out to take a close look at people who have cultivated ‘what the German writer ...”

“... Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry Eagleton, ‘small, solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is ...”

“... second Mrs de Winter thinks that modesty has ‘something to do with minding meeting people in a passage on the way to the bathroom’. This may be a limited interpretation of one of the great Christian virtues but it is pointing in the right direction. Yet the same person, when she hears that her husband murdered his first wife, instead of deploring the ...”

“... or bad, clever or stupid? Stendhal asks himself in the summer of 1832 is the opening of a poem by Charles Boyle. Wet from the shower    towelling your breasts you ask me if I’ve read    Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic goes Michael Hulse’s poem ‘Fornicating and Reading the Papers’. Meanwhile, Didsbury has ‘The sky is like an entry in ...”

“... This was one of the most resourceful and engaging of Genette’s Cratylists, the poet and linguist Charles Nodier, writing in 1828 about the hopes he had felt as an 18-year-old, fired as he then was no doubt by the propaganda of the French Revolution. For the dream of linguistic unity could hardly not have a politics to go with it. This could as well be a ...”

“... and ensure that the Indian Christians, though still a minority, would eventually come to govern. Charles Kingsley – another of the founders – supported the South in the American Civil War. The passage of time did not bring any further coherence to Christian socialism: a theologically-based morality does not confer any ...”

“... to only one part of the island. The original problems remain, with a malignancy enhanced by the passage of time, in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland remains a mirror image of the original ‘Irish problem’, but with the very considerable complication that the political balance militates against the application of a similar solution. The period between ...”

“... for phrase-making was only surpassed by his historical inaccuracy, depicted him in a memorable passage in Coningsby as ‘the Arch-Mediocrity who presided rather than ruled over this Cabinet of Mediocrities’. Disraeli went on: The Arch-Mediocrity himself had some glimmering traditions of political science. He was sprung from a laborious stock, had ...”

“... reads like a series of postcards home, complete with snaps: Self with the Queen, Self with Prince Charles, Kenyatta, Chairman Hua, Lee Kuan Yew, Self receiving life-membership of the NUT (some gift!), Self receiving honorary doctorate, Self in state robes. The great events of history alternate, paragraph by cosy paragraph, with the great events of his ...”

“... quoted, including an arrangement during the phoney war months for each partner to read the same passage in the Bible every day at the same time. In addition, the diaries became increasingly an outlet for tensions and frustrations – but they do not provide a fair, objective account either of the man or of his opinions on individuals. It must be said, in ...”

“... Daniel Crilly (Irish Party Member for North Mayo) and Fanny Parnell (patriotic poet and sister of Charles Stewart) take on an almost fictive existence, like characters in a novel. Herbert Horne and Yeats’s view of him, Yeats’s ‘hushed, musical, eerie’ manner of speaking on that night in Southwark, as well as Crilly’s recent trial on a political ...”

“... we learn precisely nothing. To understand how Lawrence revised one must look elsewhere – say to Charles Ross’s The Composition of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’. Ross covers the basics effectively in fifty pages and also reproduces sample pages of the manuscripts, which give a vivid impression of Lawrence’s working habits. Some of these ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... a devoted readership for the next sixty or so years. (It was some of the favourite reading of Charles X, the last of the Bourbon kings.) What may be reckoned bad luck, though, is for this harmless, foolish, and not un-endearing relic of a dead fashion, to have been resurrected under the auspices of the MLA, as a masterpiece of cultural criticism and a ...”

“... for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of Coleridge had he died shipwrecked off Sicily. The audit is positive: what came next, according to Holmes, only damaged his startling early achievements. Even more tantalising questions might be asked of a ...”