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“... dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect. Justice was not prolific; like Elizabeth Bishop, with whom he has much in common, he devoted his life to the perfection of a small body of deceptively modest poems. His work exhibits little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with whom he ...”

“... begetter of admiration in other people. Yet none that loved him could easily match the love of James Boswell, who puttered along for many years, joyously, drunkenly, boisterously, earnestly, with his love of Dr Johnson both a wondrous act of worship and a curious kind of self-loving. Arm in arm on their way up the High Street, Boswell and Johnson were a ...”

“... the bourgeoisie, or to those with wit and address enough to marry the niece of a childless dean or bishop. There was still a sub-stratum of vilely exploited curates, in the tradition of Crabbe’s no-hoper who toiled over Euripides while ‘four fair daughters and five sorrowing sons’ chased the duns from the door (nobody wanted to marry a curate’s ...”

“... of Chekhov’s plays is not unique. Shakespeare’s begin and in a sense end as stories; Henry James could not write for the stage, but produced tales and novels which have taken to it in a way which would have startled and perhaps discomposed him, even though he claimed in his Notebooks, after his own theatrical debacle, that the disaster had at least ...”

“... has died too – and She writes with the man a corpse before her but instead of addressing the Bishop or Mr Wilberforce – she hath recourse to that proscribed – Atheistical – syllogistical – phlogistical person – mysen – as they say in Notts.’ At other times Byron pugnaciously elevates his alienation into a heroic role, remarking: ‘I should ...”

“... by Professor Robert Mandrou. In this context it is interesting to note that Charles Miron, Bishop of Angers, who exposed Marthe as a fraud with almost casual ease before she even reached Paris, was himself the son of Henri III’s premier médecin. Marescot’s report on the affaire Brossier was published by the French government with an obvious ...”

“... club-tongued by comparison. Imagine Esther Rantzen speaking for twenty minutes without notes. The Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, fruitily delivered a maiden speech which took me back to Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, where I listened to him earlier in his career. Familiarity bred indifference, but Lord Cledwyn, next up for Labour, offered what ...”

“... and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by telling the tale in the third person. Trevor began as a ruefully comic chronicler of geriatrics and eccentrics (The Old Boys, The Boarding-House), squinnying at the frailties of the genteel ...”

“... In the English-speaking countries, they have been especially active from the 18th-century Bishop Lowth in England, Richard Grant White in the America of a century later, to Fowler and his successors in our own time. Many of them found they were ‘doing well by doing good’, as Tom Lehrer puts it in another connection, and the popular profitability ...”

“... or the progress from eiders to eiderdown. Such lines and shorelines bring to mind Elizabeth Bishop, littered as they are with correspondences – a turtle like ‘a covered wagon’ or the ocean ‘wrinkling like tinfoil’. She lays the paint on more thickly than Bishop: but can she rise to the grandiloquence of ...”

“... master of Pembroke College, Cambridge; prebendary of St Paul’s; dean of Westminster; and bishop of Chichester, Ely and, finally, Winchester. What must have seemed a surprising tribute from the premier poet of Modernism to a relatively forgotten cleric was of course part of Eliot’s own journey towards a conservative (and at times ...”

“... may yet produce a surprise result in Paraguay’s elections. Fernando Lugo, a 58-year-old former bishop, emerged two years ago as the unexpected candidate of the freshly minted left-wing opposition, and has been leading in the opinion polls ever since. With a doctorate in sociology and a continuing enthusiasm for liberation theology, Lugo is known to his ...”

“... In the spring of 1604, the English were adjusting to the arrival of King James from Scotland, attending to the doings of his first Parliament, and awaiting the arrival of envoys from the King of Spain to negotiate an end to twenty years of war. Peace, even with the Scots, was in the air. This did not please everybody, and some of the people it did not please were Catholics, who thought that the Spaniards had let them down by failing to make formal toleration for them a condition of the peace ...”

“... goes about his business, dispensing pieces of wisdom to his flock, thinking of ways to avoid the bishop, and looking out for the Devil, in whom he has no difficulty believing. He’s seen the Devil, after all: he runs the tobacconist’s shop at the bottom of the hill and he smells of sulphur. Ralph Eldred in A Change of Climate believes in God but has read ...”

“... the vicar of Wreay, some papers in the Carlisle Record Office and the diaries of Losh’s uncle, James. For the modern biographer it is slim pickings, and Uglow takes the only possible course, which is to build up the background and the context in the hope that they will describe an outline in the foreground, a space that will suggest what Losh was like and ...”