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“... about the situation – & perhaps a little more than all,’ he murmured side-of-mouth to Edmund Wilson late in 1957. ‘There is a (secret) Russian text in Oxford, in the keeping of the sisters of the poet: they guard it like Cerberi … I have (secretly) got a microfilm of the Russian text to the Widener Library for safe-keeping, but they are not supposed ...”

“... most marked in his views on foreign policy. He melded Teddy’s perspective with that of Woodrow Wilson, who despite the antagonism between the two men, shared the older Roosevelt’s commitment to military intervention abroad, provided it could be cloaked in robes of righteousness. After Wilson’s election in 1912, FDR ...”

“... basis of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘William Wilson’, and his literary aesthetic asserted in dozens of reviews as well as prefaces to his poetry and story collections, he pulled off one of the most famous stunts in newspaper history. Somehow he persuaded the editor of the New York Sun to publish an ...”

“... and exorcism from sacred to profane representation’. One is reminded of the argument of the late Frances Yates, popularised by Sir Roy Strong, about the replacement of the image of the Virgin Mary by that of the Virgin Queen. This brief summary does less than justice to the richness of Greenblatt’s interpretation, or to his skill in interweaving ...”

“... to build a permanent base for itself in the desert. (The portrayal of the ashram owes something to Frances Fitzgerald’s book Cities on a Hill and its account of the would-be city of Rajneeshpuram. Updike’s Arhat – ‘Deserving One’ – shares with the leader of Rajneeshpuram, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Bernard Levin’s one-time hero, a fondness for ...”

“... To meet wartime demand for foodstuffs, and also to secure his re-election in 1916, Woodrow Wilson pressed Congress to pass the Federal Farm Loan Act, which set up a string of farm land banks to advance loans to a maximum of $3000 at 6 per cent, or $22 a month. Then everything began to go wrong. From 1917 to 1920 annual rainfall fell off to an average ...”

“... He obviously enjoyed being made much of and he liked a good junket. A trip to Japan with Angus Wilson was particularly rewarding. At one striptease club, as Wilson recorded, ‘when word went round that we were Spender and Wilson – every single person in the place asked for our ...”

“... people thought that there was something too convenient about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbour for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American ...”

“... The phobia about the Thames flooding through the Greenwich foot tunnel suffered by the wimpish Frances Peverell signals the obvious prompt to Dame Phyllis (obligingly picked up by John Walsh in the Independent magazine). The drag, for this reviewer, was being caught up in an unforgiving ‘Garlands of English Literature’ quiz set by a bright, time-warped ...”