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“... are terribly important to me,’ she told Michiko Kakutani in 1979, as she caressed ‘a tiny green pillbox’. ‘I would love to just have control over my own body – to stop the pain, to stop my hand from shaking. If I were five feet ten and had a clear gaze and a good strong frame, I would not have such a maniacal desire for control because I would ...”

“... Secrecy, having invoked Hermes as the god of hermeneutics, conducted a striking interpretation of Henry Green’s Party Going, in which he was able to identify a character unnamed by Green as Hermes in person! There is, one observes, a kind of joyous superfluity about this last example: his exegesis did not depend on ...”

“... Fülöp-Miller, who in The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1927) found Russian peasants worshipping Henry Ford and Soviet revolutionaries aiming to introduce Taylorist ‘scientific management’ to their factories; Rem Koolhaas, whose Delirious New York (1978) linked the collective dream projects of the Soviet avant-garde to the built realities of Coney Island ...”

“... By Cappercleuch we turned and saw St Mary’s Loch, a beautiful, flat mirror beneath the brown and green of the hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that ...”

“... most of it is. Even Jane Dunn finds it hard to tell things apart, at one stage mixing up Reggie Green-Wilkinson, White’s first husband, with the fictional version Archie Hughes-Follett as she relates the story of their wedding night (the same in both life and novel), when Antonia, having been warned by her mother that something so appalling was going to ...”

“... sailors and pilots during the war. Divorce cost three guineas, and the government paid. When Henry Betterton, a barrister who had been the Conservative MP for Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire since 1918, was appointed chair of the special committee on legal aid and legal advice in 1944, the argument for legal aid had virtually been won. A compassionate ...”

“... still looks unnervingly bold.) I vaguely recall one all-night event at (I think) Screen on the Green, which mixed rad new post-punk bands with Herzog films. (Memo to my younger self: really not a good idea to take amphetamines before going to see 16-rpm directors like Herzog and Tarkovsky.) Artists like Fassbinder and Kiefer also aimed for something like ...”

“... done so, it is not clear that, left to themselves, they have left themselves much to say. It was Henry Sidgwick who best exposed the pretension. And it was Sidgwick who, from well beyond the grave, did as much as anyone to keep the subject out of Cambridge. Yet he was not an obvious enemy. In the 1860s he had lectured on philosophy and political theory in ...”

“... Melba in a Paris street and asked her for money, she gave him what she had in her purse. But Henry James’s friend Morton Fullerton made a more typical response – he must have written this letter with Shakespeare’s play open on his desk: I am distressed to have left your touching appeal unanswered for so long. But I have been on congé in the ...”

“... of Plantagenet Kings. C.H. Sisson finds himself in the same company in the bracing reign of Henry VIII. Philip Larkin joins Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen for the final flowering of the Great War. Tom Paulin has denounced Mr Baker’s attempt to establish a single English tradition as the work of a ‘blood and soil’ nationalist. Jonathan Clark has ...”

“... biography had to be written so that we, unlike the benighted Victorian, can thoroughly understand Henry Esmond. This mission to unlock the text is what sanctions – ostensibly – the vast expenditure of 20th-century biographical energy and treasure on such issues as Dickens and Ellen Ternan, Hardy and Tryphena Sparks, Trollope and Kate Field, James and his ...”

“... d’esprit, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’, he was playing with the same idea which Henry James would explore elaborately in his story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. In both cases a narrator awaits, hopes and seeks for the arrival of the true thing, the Big Experience. And the awareness of looking is itself the indication that it will not be ...”

“... a lasting inspiration for the authentically progressive – whoever you consider those to be, from Henry Moore to Gilbert and George – in an English art world that remained through the 20th century recalcitrantly retardataire, forever harking back to Victorian escapism and prettiness. On the contrary, goes the other voice, genuine innovation in England was ...”

“... a white refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident ...”

“... ends with a parody, an affectionate rewrite of Sir Gawain called ‘The Seventh Knight and the Green Cat’, which closes with a volte-face. Whatever Mr Brownjohn has to say he says ‘truthfully’: it is hard to think of many writers at once so lacking in blague and yet so unboring. In substance, many of these poems come close to the ...”