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“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... on Rhetoric and Belies Lettres in Edinburgh, it was at Glasgow University in 1751 that Adam Smith became the first person to give an official university course in English that dealt with the technique and appreciation of modern writers in that language as well as in the Classical tongues. Hugh Blair, a Church of Scotland minister who from 1762 became ...”

“... that befitted a burgeoning colony. Today the site is the forecourt of the new Museum of Sydney, with the ghostly floor-plan of the original residence picked out in white on the granite flagstones. At its perimeter, adjoining a row of Victorian terraces once used for Customs and Immigration, stand 29 pillars of sandstone, steel, I-beam and ...”

“... beyond York to an area even more remote than the one inhabited by his contemporary, the clergyman Sydney Smith, who complained that he was so remote from civilisation he was twenty miles from a lemon. An absence of lemons wouldn’t have bothered Stubbs, who shut himself up in a farmhouse at Hawkstow in North Lincolnshire, in what’s now ...”

“... fiat made most of the inmates adherents of the Church of England, and an Anglican priest, Percy Smith, saw a future for Charles other than as a stockman. Charles and several other boys would be saved by being sent to school in Adelaide. White Australians, rudely confident of their superiority over ‘boongs’, were starting to adjust to non-British ...”

“... rather than resemblance: a point gently made by Carey when speaking of an autobiographical Sydney writer who chose to dwell on her eight months in Paris and ignore her 28 years in Australia. ‘Typical,’ he remarks; ‘but we will not go into that now.’ Readers will probably differ in their responses to these Antipodean, antinomian ...”

“... none of his biographers looks closely enough at the role in his personal mythology of his Uncle Sydney, the first Lord Olivier, his family’s highest achievement until he overlook it. In his memory, Sydney is juxtaposed significantly to his father’s parsimonies: the bathwater his sons had to share, his razor-thin ...”

“... Boring characters ... they don’t work. I find them rather dull.’ It was Nancy Banks-Smith, in a review of Stand Up Nigel Barton, who, according to Gilbert, put her finger on the flaw which ‘would run right through Potter’s work: “The women were weird. The witch, a bitch and a fool. The schoolmistress was a nightmare to frighten little ...”

“... viragos. During his Nighttown visions, such ladies plan at considerable length to horsewhip Bloom. Sydney Smith had remarked, a good deal earlier, that nothing astonished the country clergy more than the difficulty found by squires in producing heirs, and with the march of time such comment would have become more widespread. Bloom would have heard a good ...”

“... of George Eliot, and partly developed in her solitary childhood. Orphaned at 18, she sets out for Sydney, and uses half her parents’ fortune to buy a glass factory. Unladylike, childishly impatient of convention, she’s as blind, in her way, as Oscar is, and as selfish. But she’s a survivor – the end of the book leaves her with nothing at all, but we ...”

“... come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens. Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and diver who has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods in the wild, mostly off the coast of his native Sydney, for years. The alienness of octopuses, in his view, provides an opportunity to ...”

“... and new scientific knowledge were often the primary purpose of voyages of exploration. The records Sydney Parkinson made for Joseph Banks, for example, seem very like those made by White – similar in subject-matter, and not very different in appearance and technique. But the modern reading of White’s album drawings – they were published with immense ...”

“... just to English poets, but to Scottish ones too. Nowhere does he mention (nor did Kenner) W.S. (Sydney) Graham, who took, perhaps at greater cost, the same decision that Tomlinson and Bunting made. Douglas Dunn, whose anthology is blessedly free of the prejudices that constrict Crawford, allows Graham 20 pages (as against 35 for MacDiarmid, 22 for Robert ...”

“... milieu of 1950s Edinburgh. For a time, Brown mixed there with Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and other poets and literati. With its prostitutes and smoky, male-dominated pubs sporting signs which stated ‘Women Not Supplied’, Rose Street was a shithole of gender politics, emblematic in some ways ...”

“... deficiencies. A second problem looks simple enough but can never be resolved. Why write a Life of Smith or Mrs Jones, and why should it be read? The Rousseauistic answer is that any life (especially mine, but even yours perhaps) is of interest if it can evoke a tear; and the reading public has been told, chiefly in autobiographies, how many a tender branch ...”