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“... on the Continent. In the early 17th century libraries of more than a thousand volumes were rare: Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury between 1604 and 1610, had perhaps the largest of the day at around six thousand volumes. A hundred years later, John Moore, bishop of Ely, had more than thirty thousand books. Moore’s collection is now a star of ...”

“... of burial, and the tour de force is also a sober labour of love. This Waugh has affiliations with Richard Boston’s Osbert Lancaster, the portrait of a connoisseur of social oddity who also loved it steadily and whole. Boston is discriminatingly informative about Lancaster’s achievement as artist and cartoonist, and about such lesser-known matters as his ...”

“... has been almost completely forgotten. This act of historical amnesia is one of the themes of Richard Roberts’s Saving the City, the only major book-length treatment of this topic to appear since 1915. On Roberts’s account, people at the time didn’t really distinguish between the distinct crises of August 1914, financial, military and ...”

“... Canon Charcot’s method of consumption: pull out the gizzard and swallow the bird whole. M.F.K. Fisher calls this recipe ‘brutishly refined’ but admits puzzlement as to what the canon did with the feathers.) By the time of Petronius the dish was already an absurdity. Decapitated at the table, live thrushes (the poor man’s fig-pecker) fluttered out of ...”

“... in blood: the blood of Edmund de la Pole in 1513, of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521, of More and Fisher in 1535, of Anne Boleyn and her alleged lovers in 1536, of Thomas Cromwell and the Protestants burned without trial in 1540, of the surviving supporters of Catherine of Aragon and of the Marquis of Exeter in 1540-1, of the Earl of Surrey in 1547. Thomas ...”

“... Cambridge. On parade (on King’s Parade in fact) just after ten, where the calming presence of Richard Lloyd Morgan, the chaplain of King’s, waits to shepherd me to the Senior Common Room. It’s already crowded with dons, some, since it’s the university sermon, presumably heads of houses.* I manage to avoid a chat by settling into a corner to con my ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... part of Eliza Doolittle: reportedly, she said, ‘Get me My Fair Lady,’ to then-husband Eddie Fisher and agent Kurt Frings. I wonder if Liz knew that Audrey had turned down the part of Cleopatra in 1959. Audrey later said: ‘Oh come on, I’m not a movie star. Liz Taylor is a movie star.’ For a movie star, that’s a surreal disclaimer, though it ...”

“... worked with Randolph S. on editing the C papers, here useful on C and social reform; the navalist Richard Ollard, who has written on the Churchill-impacted Admirals Fisher and Cunningham (and the Navy), John Grigg (and Lloyd George), etc. The platoon’s roll goes on, with Gordon A. Craig, America’s Germanist and ...”

“... Haldane was one of a trio of mathematically minded biologists – the other two were Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright – who brought Mendelian genetics and natural selection together in what became known as the Modern or neo-Darwinian Synthesis, a comprehensive theory of evolution which persisted throughout much of the rest of the 20th century. In the ...”

“... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...”

“... allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his favoured cardinals from taking juicy revenues out of England. British membership of the EU has, per contra, attracted billions of foreign capital to Britain, while ...”

“... 1960s was his campaign against Stuart Montgomery. Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press had published Roy Fisher, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Duncan and Lee Harwood, and seemed poised to become the publisher the British Poetry Revival of those years needed to counterbalance the waning radical commitments of the post-Eliot Faber list. Reprinting Finlay’s 1960 volume ...”

“... as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life (2014), ‘the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today.’ Facebook extends this logic to people’s own personal history, informing them of what banal activity they were engaged in this time last year, or eight years ...”