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“... of unwritten rules governing what is appropriate or out of place in a chosen literary style. Like Henry James’s, Iris Murdoch’s style is high, in the sense that she writes about lofty matters – the nature of morality, the reasons for existence, how we should live and love, how we should die – as they arise in stories about the upper middle ...”

“... when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir Robert Stapylton (1647) and Henry Fielding (1743) have a go at translating Juvenal’s ferocious account of the profligate Empress Messalina working as a prostitute in a Roman brothel and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ... auratis’). As G.K. Chesterton ...”

“... Ms Ortiz Taylor sets up her fiction on much shakier ground – not on the turf of the village green but on the thin crust of earth which protects California from the San Andreas fault. If she also selects a homely simile, it is to pile layer upon layer the pretexts for her heroine’s insecurity: ‘Picture, if you will, a tiny child standing next to her ...”

“... the jacket of the recent reissue of a novel of my own, it reproduces the Liverpool Stubbs, ‘The Green Monkey’. But Mr Turner’s subtitle is ‘Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind’ (in which the superfluous comma after ‘pain’ might pass, if one is being polite, for pastiche of Victorian punctuation). It sits ill on a picture not merely ...”

“... of the impetuous, supercharged narrative manner of Virginia Woolf, or the cumulative music of Henry James. Where syntax and the overall shaping of a sentence are concerned, Clampitt can match both these supreme artists in the way she reflects the state of an enquiring or apprehending mind by means of the fits and starts of individual phrases and ...”

“... of superphosphates, generously subsidised, seemed a magical way of turning the great brown country green; whenever anyone looked for a mineral they found it; vast schemes were begun designed to turn Australia into the rice bowl of South-East Asia; Australia’s own people’s car, the Holden (virtually General Motors), poured off the assembly lines. On a visit ...”

“... heat death. It is peopled by post-Sawston man talking, more often than not, a debased dialect of Henry Jamespeak. If you take too deep a breath while reading Stewart, you’re likely to get a lung full of periphrases or a litotes up your nose. This effect is mostly germane to his purpose, which is to convey the feel of a dense, over-lived-in social ...”

“... known; less familiar is the influence he exerted over a younger generation of thinkers including Henry Sidgwick, Dicey and T.H. Green. Arnold Toynbee ended his lectures on the Industrial Revolution with a tribute to Mazzini as ‘the greatest teacher of our age’. Mazzini’s moral language and his insistence on the ...”

“... having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the ...”

“... Port Ticonderoga. The Chase family wealth was based on buttons. (There is a hidden gibe here at Henry James, who in The Ambassadors would not let Strether tell us what was the embarrassing household article on which the Newsomes of Woolett had raised their fortune: ‘a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use . . . It’s ...”

“... Theatricality paid dividends: by 1908 the WSPU had official colours (purple, white and green), badges and banners, a weekly paper, extensive London offices, a network of organisers and branches, and wealthy backers. It also had critics: another militant organisation, the Women’s Freedom League, was founded in 1907 by dissidents unable to stomach ...”

“... on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper and mechanised commander, McChrystal rose quickly through the ranks. He was deployed for a few months to Afghanistan in 2002 before returning to serve in the office of the Joint Chiefs as the Pentagon’s debriefer to Congress and the ...”

“... we soon learn, had similar expectations: ‘I had read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Henry James, and I expected England to be the book I always wanted to live in.’ But, Malcolm writes dryly, for Stevenson ‘England turned out to be another book altogether.’ Soon after the publication of Bitter Fame, Malcolm meets her in London at the ...”

“... once dominated Ireland as the Ascendancy, it’s a rather different story. In Youghal, a slow green avalanche of weeds and brambles has flowed over the Protestant cemetery around St Mary’s collegiate church. Here, Patrick, very bored, sat through services in the family gallery above rows of almost empty pews, and tried to catch baby bats in a ...”

“... Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile. In the 1950s Jannice Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter ...”