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“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... utopian. The ramshackle Empire was to be reorganised into a world-state of self-governing nations, freely co-operating and acting as one in defence, trade, foreign policy and ideals of citizenship. As Seeley had taught, the British would cease to think of themselves as a European people with a rag-bag of overseas possessions, and take their place around a ...”

“... not enlighten people … and blunt arguments will not penetrate,’ he argued, ‘then doth reason freely resign its place to wit, allowing it to undertake its work of instruction and reproof.’ But how to amuse without giving offence? ‘There are two kinds of joke,’ Giovanni della Casa, the Florentine authority on manners, explained in 1558. ‘The ...”

“... Mainwaring set out his thoughts on how to stop the poor stealing from the better-off, he first freely acknowledged that in periods of high food prices and high unemployment, the poor ‘must either live by plunder or die from starvation’. Everyone knew that when jobs were short, the number of robberies and of other crimes against property shot up. The ...”

“... 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him. He seems to have been immune to such essentially human feelings. Carlyle happened to be in the library in 1875 when Bryan Courthope ...”

“... the wake of the couple’s acrimonious separation. Byron’s side of the story went up in smoke in John Murray’s grate when the poet’s publisher presided over the burning of his memoirs. If we want Byron’s relationships with those who knew him, why should we not just read his often wonderful letters? One answer might be that Leslie Marchand’s 12-volume ...”

“... accepted by Liston or Patterson. The space in which imagination and conjecture could float freely has long since been filled in, however. Nowadays, Ali is a secular saint and every off-the-cuff remark he ever made has been set down as Holy Writ. It is out of the sadness or failure of his contemporaries that genuine expressions of humanity are more ...”

“... the Obscure resembles Dickensian black comedy turned absurdist, the epitaphic aspirations of a John Chivery in Little Dorrit chilled to the bone, then the receding acknowledgment of Hades-bound presences in the narrative coda of The Newcomes provides the textual obverse of Amy Dorrit’s confidence in closural inscription, which seems for her the ...”

“... governess, Miss Tink. Miss Tink, for all the monosyllabic innocence of her name, had a bad cousin, John, who may well also have influenced the child Borges, because he was one of the street-corner ‘hoodlums’ who later fascinated him, partly for being so brave as well as bad, when they fought, and partly because he saw them as ideal compendia of the local ...”

“... because the tensions and problems are simply too great for anyone. This is in part the theme of John Morrison’s efficient and often thoughtful biography, which sets out to show that, contrary to the view held (at least until recently) by many observers and politicians in the West, Yeltsin is ‘squarely in the democrats’ camp’. He reminds us that, as ...”

“... with the greatest suspicion? There is an inlaw and outlaw category for men too, but they can move freely from one to the other, and indeed it may be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and ...”

“... and a new cohesiveness – its constituent parts “talk” to one another readily, eloquently and freely, while preserving their unique identities.’ This seems a lot for any literature to do. Alas, it emerges that the editors have a withered conception of both the literary and the political. ‘The post-Romantic tradition in the British Isles,’ they ...”

“... would shy away from Beckett being described as ‘a master of English prose’, the accolade freely given to Wodehouse. The vocabulary of appreciation changes our mode of response from age to age. Raymond Chandler went as a schoolboy to Dulwich the year Wodehouse left, and there is a reference to him in the letters as a writer to be admired and read more ...”

“... Belgrade as Head of the American Mission to Tito. He ended the war as political adviser to General John Harding (of whose XIII Corps in Venezia Giulia pars minor fui), trying to stop young idiots like myself from starting a Third World War. Thus although he missed the early, heroic years of the resistance, he was ideally placed to observe, both in the field ...”