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“... that small degree of overlap between Auden and Gross. Auden fancies aphorists like Simone Weil and Charles Williams, neither to be found in Gross, and Gross has his pets – Sherrington, for instance, and Thomas Szasz, unknown to Auden. The earlier book has a useful thematic index, Gross’s has not. Gross is more specific about his sources. Both classify ...”

“... but as a sensitive exploration of the way it can implicate those who do not directly suffer. Charles and Mary Lamb selflessly, patiently, served the Wordsworths by interviewing survivors for news of the Captain. Wilberforce wept. Coleridge, on hearing the news in Malta, had to be helped to his room. William Wordsworth, experienced in the business of ...”

“... a biography of his father, Lord Carnock, a bestselling life of King George V, a life of Mrs Charles Lindbergh’s father, some novels and some historical studies. Of these works I had read only one, the pseudo-autobiographical Some People, first published in 1927 (according to the Author’s Note, ‘many of the following sketches are purely ...”

“... passions inflamed: Laplace was French and Adams English. Parity was restored when the Frenchman Charles Delaunay showed that Laplace’s calculation did indeed account for half the effect and that tidal friction could account for the rest. The Moon raises tides on the oceans directly below it. As the Earth rotates, it drags these tidal bulges with it, so ...”

“... husband; George Weidenfeld, her second; and her last recorded lover, the French writer Bernard Frank. There is no photograph of her third husband, the millionaire Derek Jackson, but he did not seriously engross her. She bit him twice, really hard the second time, so he shuffled off into his sixth marriage, leaving her with a farmhouse near St Tropez and ...”

“... University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, duly published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. In a year that would have seemed laborious even to a writer not suffering from marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment ...”

“... quickly recognised as years ahead of his age’. Philip refers to his brother throughout as ‘Charles’, and it is time to reveal that he was known at home as Percy, and Percy he remained for the first 45 years, ‘distant relatives’ so addressing him even after that. For the world in which he was rising ‘Snow’ was enough – surnames were, after ...”

“... This organisation very soon started to show signs of the malaise it was set up to cure. One man, Charles Knight Murray, assumed great power over the Church estates, but forgot to tell the Commissioners that he was a director of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway and an eager speculator in railway shares. To pay for his prodigious share purchases, he ...”

“... Gwen Darwin in Cambridge (in a house that is now Darwin College) in 1885, the granddaughter of Charles. The Darwins were a vast dynasty: seven of Charles’s ten children survived to adulthood and between them produced ten grandchildren and almost thirty great-grandchildren. The sons understandably found their father’s ...”

“... When Frank Norris died of appendicitis in 1902, at the age of 32, he had written six novels, as well as scores of essays and reviews. At least two of the novels, McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901), are recognised masterpieces, and a number of the essays, particularly those about the Spanish-American War, retain their power today ...”

“... generally. Cabantous touches on the excesses of English Restoration libertines like Sir Charles Sedley and on the slightly earlier and more philosophical French examples, notably Théophile de Viau. Atheists were of course blasphemers by definition, and we know from the charges against Christopher Marlowe that, like Théophile, they sometimes larded ...”

“... some prayers of unsettled authorship, a dramatisation of part of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, admittedly of little interest in itself, and some poems of which the same might be said. The 100-page introduction is lovingly minute in its coverage of early commentary, and the annotations are careful and useful. The performances of the other ...”

“... the United States she has been largely unknown.’ This is all to the advantage of Katherine Frank, a lecturer from Iowa, who has produced this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only ...”

“... poet), columnist for the Wire, broadcaster, and author of the monumental and magnificent folly, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Watson, if he wanted to carry his argument outside the poetry ghetto, had to adopt protective colouring, find a synopsis that was acceptable to the culture brokers, a name that would stand up. This is no easy ...”

“... retirement dinner, though of course on such occasions one is not on oath. White’s successor was Charles Osborne, whose sins as assistant director Goodman here attributes to the influence of White, though I very much doubt if Osborne, who has always known how to look after himself, would agree. The unsuccessful candidate was the late George MacBeth. The ...”