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“... moment, Mrs de Quincey withdrew Thomas from the school. The reasons for this are obscure, although Leslie Stephen, in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, stresses that she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose style, for ...”

“... not only the conduct of the narratives but the stage settings and music. He seems to have got Leslie Hurry to show interest, and sent a copy to John Hayward for comment. Hayward was used to this kind of request: he advised Eliot on ‘Little Gidding’ and a few years later Auden on the libretto of The Rake’s Progress; and for somebody who professed no ...”

“... Castle, the work described by the selector-cataloguers of his panoramic exhibition at the Tate, Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, as ‘for later generations the very epitome of Romantic landscape painting’. It was the most derelict, most desolate scene Constable ever pictured, with its ruined pair of towers set beside an endless flat expanse of ...”

“... proven ability to build new homes in outer space’. Thirdly, we have a cod foreword by ‘John B. Wilson BA’ (Burgess’s true name, plus AB spelt backwards?), pretending that the novel consists of papers left by a dead author who derived his title from ‘That is the end of the World News’ (a BBC sonority as awful as the Director of the Spoken Word, or ...”

“... Alex Salmond’s predecessor as leader of the Scottish National Party, the social democrat Gordon Wilson, happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between ...”

“... full fellowship from the Pepsi Cola Company and did a postgraduate year at Cambridge on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship. Conscription was still in effect, and after his educational deferments ran out, Ellsberg had to decide how to fulfil his military service obligation. On his return from Britain, he applied for officer candidate school in the Marine Corps and ...”

“... but no chorus rises to proclaim Podhoretz the bold young successor to Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Mary McCarthy in the Quality Lit Crit Biz. He is needled as a symptomatic New York intellectual specimen by Benjamin DeMott in the New York Review and cuffed around roughly by Hudson Review’s Marvin Mudrick, who ...”

“... in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: ‘Were you one of the original four?’I wonder whether there were any shy, retiring Apostles: ‘Were you one of the original twelve?’Does the Holy Ghost resent God the Father and God the Son being better known (and certainly more ...”