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“... in 1905, and attended by Duncan Grant among others. But it was not until he and Vanessa befriended Roger Fry in 1910 that Bell began publicly to champion the modern French artists such as Gauguin and Cézanne whom he had come to love. (Bell praised works by his wife and Grant, but saw them, like all British artists, as following where French art had led.) In ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... seeking out the sort of Georgian art that many British collectors ignored, and Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis was buying up the letters and ephemera of the then neglected figure, Horace Walpole, a Yale historian whose very name trumpeted Anglophilic Waspdom, Chauncey B. Tinker, tracked down Boswell’s papers to Malahide Castle in Ireland. Initially, his pleas to ...”

“... in the face of intense criticism, adhered to policies that brought us safely through. Yet John Lewis Gaddis’s book prompts the thought that perhaps the time of the historian is not yet. To be fair, Gaddis makes much of the risks of writing contemporary history, but adds that if historians are not willing to run them ‘political scientists and ...”

“... Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside the Slade lay open. Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled ...”

“... a straightforward conspiracy between the Home Secretary (Henry Brooke), the head of MI5 Sir Roger Hollis, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Sir Joseph Simpson), to ‘shut Ward up’. It is a serious charge. But Knightley, one of the most experienced and reliable investigative reporters in this country, and Caroline Kennedy, are sure of ...”

“... suggested nonetheless that the process had gone too far, and that even giants like Empson and C.S. Lewis could be guilty in this way of serious distortions of a text: he instanced a bravura passage in The Allegory of Love on Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’, in which Lewis, with his characteristic puritanical ...”

“... age of the late Forties, the paranoid plot could be used by British writers like Orwell and CS. Lewis for straightforwardly satirical purposes. Early readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four do not seem to have focused on the difficulty of distinguishing between the Brotherhood, the underground resistance movement that Winston Smith attempts to join, and the Inner ...”

“... Three years later, a newly-elected Labour government set up another secret inquiry by a barrister, Lewis Hawser QC. Hawser did for James Hanratty what another barrister, Scott Henderson, had done for Timothy Evans, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of his child. By concentrating on minute differences of detail in witness statements, he managed to ...”

“... studies to start chomping through the Omega files and spinning a story from them. Omega was Roger Fry’s creation. The Omega style was a response to Post-Impressionism. Fry not only organised the 1910 and 1912 Post-Impressionist exhibitions, he invented the very name. He was a publicist of genius. The workshops would not have lasted the six years they ...”

“... to establish left the Hogarth Press to seek larger advances from bigger houses. He tells Cecil Day-Lewis he doesn’t mind him taking his detective stories to Collins, but adds that he won’t accept an arrangement whereby he gets sent the books that probably won’t sell while the others are reserved for somebody else. On such topics he meditates with a ...”

“... up in the whirl of events and day-to-day politicking. Some historians, following the lead of Lewis Namier, who saw political ideas largely as a rhetorical smokescreen for the advancement of interests, have treated Burke as a mere placeman and hack – albeit one with wit, cerebral depth and a marvellous turn of phrase. But reductionism of this sort ...”

“... in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to redraw the cultural map. The Victorians were moribund, their prosody stalled at the level of Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’, a paean to obedience that filled the ...”

“... scepticism into his own full-blown critical observation: ‘Even the name of the hero dunce, Lewis Theobald, though printed out in full, was “translated” (like Bottom wearing the ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) into a foolish tumble of syllables rhyming with “ribald”.’ Elsewhere in the Life, Professor Mack makes the point that the ...”

“... manner. Thomas notes that in 1620, ‘Anne Lea, walking through Nantwich churchyard, passed Anne Lewis, a former servant whom she had dismissed; Anne acknowledged her by making “a curtsy in a scornful and deriding manner”.’ Anne Lewis’s churchyard performance encourages us to ask how civility was understood and ...”