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“... forces of Church and State. But an even worse fate was in store for her. Anthony Armstrong-Jones was already well known as a society photographer. He had been to Eton and Cambridge (he had coxed the winning Cambridge eight in the Boat Race). But he was still regarded as a common snapper. Colin Tennant, a founder ...”

“... up looking for the life in the work is another matter. Some, of course, are already persuaded. Colin Burrow scrupulously resisted biographical readings in his 2002 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, and, reviewing Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) in the LRB, he deplored ‘the heuristic poverty of ...”

“... back to the landscape of terns and gulls, to Pip’s encounter with Magwitch on the marshes. Tom Jones, on the other hand, gives its hero the least interpretable name you could imagine. This hero sounds not just ordinary but so ordinary he must eventually become as significant as his guardian, the over-aptly named Allworthy. Giving a character a completely ...”

“... terror. Cheerful visions beneath which you can always see something like horror.Listen to Colin Burrow discuss this piece with Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”

“... she describes Bonham Carter, who ‘as it happens’ is a cousin of Glenconner’s late husband, Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner), coming for tea and taking copious notes. It was at this moment, as she tried to recall useful details such as the princess’s smoking style (‘rather like a Chinese tea ceremony’) that she began to consider writing about her ...”

“... met this clever-naif teenage narrator before, in the novels of J. D. Salinger, Denton Welch and Colin MacInnes. But the device is still successful; and Nicky is, in a surprising way, a prize ...”

“... something of a hiatus, until the first volumes of the New Dictionary of National Biography, under Colin Matthew, begin to appear early next century, with all lives revised and the text sprinkled with ten thousand pictures. A DNB newsletter issued to mark this transition lists some of the odder occupations, or claims to distinction, recorded in earlier ...”

“... last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is ...”

“... of intellectual ambition. Here are Gay Studies Advanced, Intermediate and also Rudimentary. Colin Spencer’s Homosexuality: A History is the work of a hobbyist, who offers what is essentially a scrap-book of the various ways that homosexuality has been inflected in different periods and cultures. Spencer leaves ‘Analysis and Reflections’ for his ...”

“... academic specialisms waltz into the room. My mother, who was the children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones (and whose eightieth birthday recently prompted what must be the ultimate public recognition in the form of a Google doodle: the techies in California clearly like reading fantasy), once said at a dinner with a group of American academics that she loved The ...”

“... example of the man on the cross is what makes it so. I once argued with my mother, Diana Wynne Jones, about the conclusions to her best books, The Homeward Bounders and Fire and Hemlock, both of which end in a similar way, with the main characters appearing to give up everything, including people they love, in order to anchor or reconstruct the rest of the ...”

“... as many ‘conformable puritans’ did in that period. Some biographers believe, as Edward Jones notes in his learned overview of archives relating to the young poet, that Milton lost sympathy with orthodox worship when an inspection of Horton parish church in 1637 required that the raised pew occupied by the Milton family should be lowered and his ...”

“... it were, A Family Daughter says, here’s the person who might have written it. (Meloy’s brother Colin, the frontman of a band called The Decemberists, is playing a similarly ironic game when he sings: ‘I am a writer, a writer of fictions … I’ve written pages upon pages trying to rid you from my bones.’ Is he teasing his sister? He’s certainly ...”

“... delighted she’s paying so much attention, and on the next page, where Kay gets bored just when Colin thinks she’s hanging on his every word. Those are great, rather Ayckbournish touches … but sometimes in your scenes the reader gets lost between points of view. At that disastrous dinner party of Samantha’s, there’s a bit in ...”

“... with Bremer – or the viceroy, as Chandrasekaran calls him – and the US secretary of state, Colin Powell. When Greenstock suggested that one of Bremer’s edicts might have been too severe: ‘the viceroy snapped at him. The message was clear: Don’t contradict me.’ In 2006 Greenstock discussed his powerlessness with Blair’s biographer Anthony ...”