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“... in January 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year ...”

“... which has provided a basis for Patrick Cockburn’s narrative. In reality, the Week’s best sources for cabinet disputes, private conference sessions or appeasement plotting at the Astors’ mansion were dissident politicians and foreign diplomats, who were often told things concealed from the British public.Like George Orwell and several other ...”

“... but rather dismissive reviews by other people. Anyway I was intrigued by this play, and liked it best of all those put on during the festival – and said so in my radio report. But I’d left the proceedings early in order to write the piece; I hadn’t stayed to hear the commanding officer of the Second Tactical Air Force, who was giving the prize to some ...”

“... literary hats, but sub-Spenserian pastorals were definitely not his scene: the emblem-writer Geoffrey Whitney is a more likely candidate. Another valuable essay is contributed by Spenser’s biographer Andrew Hadfield, though not on Spenser himself, who has no particular connection with Shakespeare (the idea that ‘pleasant Willy’ in The Tears of the ...”

“... about some forms of philistinism. It puts tough literary minds on their mettle, say, and gets the best out of gentler characters who might want to entertain but would hardly venture on ‘Art’. Amis is listed by Hugh Kenner as an example of the post-(Second-World-) War trough in the English arts, a case of ‘anarchic energies ... there to draw ...”

“... licence to distinguish him from those who are National Socialists out of conviction. The historian Geoffrey Barraclough pointed out, long ago, that Hitler’s was Germany’s first genuine bourgeois revolution. So, perhaps it’s a matter of class?The reason, Martin-Heinz Douglas Freiherr von Bora, is that you are all that we’re striving to leave behind, the ...”

“... perfected their skills in duplicity – ‘love and kisses’ – but they were giving it their best shot. Shortly, secret services on both sides of the Iron Curtain would hone the arts of lying. Thompson died in early June, but it wasn’t until 21 September that the family got official news that he was ‘missing, believed killed’. His mother had ...”

“... but they seem terribly real. Two qualities, in particular, serve to distinguish him from even the best historians writing today: his frontal assault on the subject and his bathetic asides. He begins the section on Greek civilisation with a discussion of what the Greeks looked like. Clearly Greek sculpture does not represent your average Greek; yet, ‘a ...”

“... on Pope Rogers follows analytical procedures similar to those of such earlier close-readers as Geoffrey Tillotson and W.K. Wimsatt. When discussing method in the Preface, he declares that ‘doctrinaire method should properly bend before the primacy of the text.’ He gives close, revealing attention to syntax, to hidden numerical symmetries in the ...”

“... is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling he declares in one of his best-known poems, ‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice’. Although Graves only began formulating his Muse theories in the mid-Forties, the ‘one story’ of his vocation dominates his entire career. Graves’s ‘poetic principles’ involve a wholesale rejection ...”

“... in East Grinstead; and, with his experiences still fresh in his mind, Hillary wrote his wartime best-seller, The Last Enemy. He wrote much of it in America, where he had gone in the hope of being instrumental in persuading the Americans to come into the war. In this he failed, as it was felt in official circles that the sight of his raw and patched face and ...”

“... of war crimes against US servicemen, was found to have been studying the problem since July – as best I can make out from Conot, as an act of bureaucratic free enterprise suggested to him by a colonel in the Civil Affairs Division. By mid-September Bernays submitted a six-page scheme, the essential idea of which was to try, on a charge of conspiracy, not ...”

“... pope, who was supreme in the land. Much of the material was drawn from the fanciful romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose ‘Arthurian fables’, to quote Diarmaid MacCulloch in his Life of Cranmer, ‘have met their nemesis in Walt Disney and Monty Python’. The king lapped it all up, and now so do the Jacob Rees-Moggs and Iain Duncan-Smiths, whose ...”

“... vestiges, survivors from another time. He argues that, on the contrary, ‘hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys – slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare’. Central to the ...”

“... Many of her critics used the misogynistic vocabulary of frigidity against both her and her work, Geoffrey Grigson being particularly obnoxious in attacking the imagery in her poems as such as ‘could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy’. To Harold Acton she was ‘the essential hysterical intellectual spinster’ and ...”