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“... to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great … I should like to go every night, for the comedy and wit is as enthralling as the tragedy.’ Strachey wasn’t far wrong, either. What even Victorians regarded as Victoriana at its ...”

“... a flash, I’d launch the dart at the board. This is only apparent ‘relaxation’, though, the mark of an obsessional state, and, irrationally, when Edmondsson tries to distract him from his darts and get him to return to Paris, ‘I hurled a dart at her with all my might and it stuck in her forehead.’ He is much distressed at his (not fatal) act, which ...”

“... or heretofore unpublished. So we fall upon a startlingly sexy note written by Virginia to Leonard a year and a half after their marriage, in which the Mandril [Leonard Woolf’s pet name for Virginia] ‘wishes me to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest plumage, and invites you to an ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... someone who had read it all before a dozen times? This train of speculation leads us closer to the mark. The official biography, and Churchill’s own works, are far too extensive for most people to read even if they could afford to buy them, which they cannot. So there is a huge and lucrative gap in the market for the middle-range biography. The point happens ...”

“... William Body, who complained about his lodgings was put very firmly in his place by Lord Leonard Grey: ‘I saide,’ Grey reported, ‘I was sure he sholde never be so good, as the Dukes of Norfoke, and Suffolke, and my lorde my brother [the Marquess of Dorset], whom I had seen lodged wors.’ Those in command exhibited many qualities. Grey was ...”

“... it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the ...”

“... some form of enlightenment. In Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991), Johnson’s fourth novel, Leonard English, a failed suicide, gives up his job as a medical equipment salesman in Kansas and moves to Provincetown, Massachusetts to become a private detective. He’s another drifter, a voyeuristic onlooker, who visits drag shows, develops a crush on a ...”

“... him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a question ...”

“... to shut a window or moderate the volume. One summer afternoon, when I was doggedly trying to mark a batch of A-level papers, my patience gave out, and I crossed the street in protest. Rereading this now, in the light of Carey’s book, I find myself wondering what he would make of such a tale if the complainer had been a drippy poet and the noisemakers ...”

“... are.The Brewhouse is not a garret, quite; say sheltered accommodation rather. A granny flat. But mark this. If the college is minded to provide this accommodation it’s for nothing so vulgar as a poet in residence. This isn’t Keele, still less is it East Anglia. No. We see it as providing a niche – young persons nowadays might even call it a pad – for ...”

“... Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’ Mark Steinberg is the only one of the professional historians writing on the revolution to confess to any lingering emotional attachment to it. Of course, revolutionary idealism and daring leaps into the unknown tend to result in hard landings, but, Steinberg ...”

“... he wrote in 1965 for the New Yorker, ostensibly a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his and their lives, under a series of ...”

“... Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision. Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word ...”

“... whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not like the big brave boasts of war.          GIVE ME GOOD PIGEONS! – A very large number of Great Commoners Built like Nye Bevan or Gambetta. Strong, rather than prettily melodious, clear and confident, this ...”