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“... brought retribution down on culprits ranging from retailers of saucy postcards to the publisher Henry Vizetelly, jailed for issuing Zola’s works in translation. Taking stock in 1891, Oscar Wilde complained that the Fourth Estate ‘has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of ...”

“... The myth of Robin Hood was well established by the time the sparkish Prince Harry, the future Henry V, was engaged in mischievous highway robberies, possibly little more than royal horseplay, along with that other ‘gentleman robber’ Falstaff (as unreliably described in Shakespeare’s ...”

“... fiction very easy after all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when such masters as Henry James, Conrad and Ford were agonising a lot about modern technique, but although he seems to have found the business of technique quite interesting – or rather, although he made a few knowing nods in that direction – what he really liked was to get on ...”

“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and ...”

“... scenes from tumbling into Hieronymus Bosch-like orgies, or erupting into the bawdy romps of Thomas Rowlandson. His theory of line, Beardsley claimed, was his only original idea. Instead of ‘thin lines to express backgrounds and thick lines to express foregrounds’, he kept ‘the same value of line’ in both. The resulting flattened monochrome ...”

“... seems to have shared his not-so-secret preference for Jane over Cassandra: another Austen nephew, Henry, of whom Austen had been particularly fond in his teens, told a cousin after Austen’s death that whenever he visited the house at Chawton – where Cassandra and Mrs Austen lived on for some years – ‘he could not help expecting to feel particularly ...”

“... made us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and Henry James, and though she takes a critical interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and novelists ...”

“... wit seems to have been as much a part of the ethos of the short-lived republic as sublimity: Henry Marten could subvert protest at radical measures in the Commons by laughter, and friends like Thomas Chaloner and Thomas May shared his sceptical wit. To denounce them as libertines was ...”

“... of paintings represented by the Beuckelaer, but there is good evidence to the contrary. William Thomas in the middle of the 16th century and Thomas Coryat at its close are quoted in support of the idea that the Venetians were ‘spare of living’. In Coryat’s words they kept ‘no honourable hospitality, nor gallant ...”

“... away and the contents of Mitford’s parcel were emptied out onto the table, the collector – one Thomas James Wise – recognised the momentous find and bought all dozen copies.So the story went, at any rate. But the entire tale – sausages and all – was made up by Wise. In reality the book didn’t exist before 1893, when Wise himself had forged ...”

“... Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him ...”

“... is James McConica, with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general assessment that is longer and fuller than McConica’s, but equally soundly based, up-to-date and accessible, there are two new ...”

“... written the fiction his criticism desires. A list of the weaknesses of English fiction since, say, Henry Green would go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it has been grossly, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory (Golding, Carter); the freedom of its characters ...”

“... fashionable Emersonian leader of metropolitan free thought, and was employed as a pamphleteer by Thomas Scott, Voysey’s wealthy patron. These unconventional yet genteel circles were only the prelude to a yet more drastic move into the plebeian world of secularism. By 1875 she had accepted employment on Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer and begun her ...”

“... are those of Pride and Prejudice, but the content puts one more in mind of Austen’s contemporary Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on Population sets off equally stylishly to display the elegancies of arithmetic: ‘It is a truth not generally acknowledged that, in most discussions of works of English fiction, we proceed as if a third, two-fifths, a half of our ...”