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“... for principle and button-holes’. And it is at Brummell’s well-shod feet that we can lay not only the tradition of dandyism, but the Great Masculine Renunciation itself, the turn away from pomp and ornament and finery which gave us the Savile Row suit. Hollander gives J.C. Flugel’s theory of the Great Masculine Renunciation short shrift. She ...”

“... dying out unnoticed. The Codex Regius of Eddic poetry, greatest memorial of Northern literature, lay unknown to the rest of the world in an Icelandic farmhouse for some four hundred years till Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson acquired it in 1643. Then the news began, slowly, to leak out. The OED records ‘Viking’ as a word first used in 1807, and it had been ...”

“... the gutter. When at last he impassively joined his wife, he sat Lulu next to her while he himself lay recumbent at their feet. The taxi-driver, like the man Magritte had kicked some thirty years before, was so thrown by this ‘solution’ that he drove off without a word. Such behaviour, while diverting, is not so very surprising. What I did find mildly out ...”

“... sparingness in the matter of language perished with him. He died in 1941, just when Jean-Paul Sartre, homo loquax made flesh, was launching unscrupulously out on the seven hundred pages of L’Etre et le néant. And, fresh from reading Bergson, I find it frustrating that his sociable brevity, and the even more sociable clarity that went with ...”

“... school exercise book and becomes the conduit for a writerly correspondence; a disregarded copy of Paul Bowles’s Let it Come Down lolls on the counter of a pub, a gift already regretted; another gift, received from a stranger by the 17-year-old narrator while she is working on checkout 19 at the local supermarket, sits unopened by the till:I put the book on ...”

“... manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, expected to be intimidated and found himself before a ‘principled old maid’: ‘That hairless face, those fine features, that light voice combined with the stiff, fussy manners, presented the almost asexual character I was later to recognise in ...”

“... the four Hoke Moseley books he wrote in the 1980s, has just been announced in the US; it will star Paul Giamatti, the shlub from Sideways. It’s really good casting. Willeford is adored by his peers and big-deal crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles ...”

“... diamonds and pearls. Confident that my every word would be welcome, if not infinitely precious, I lay in my hospital bed with a happily expectant air. It’s hard not to see Updike’s tremendous output – more than sixty books over five decades – as the fulfilment of a filial quest. Linda had a bad temper, and administered ‘stinging ...”

“... a prominent role in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798, whose ideological origins lay in the radicalism of Presbyterian Belfast, but which developed a curious sectarian momentum, becoming in many respects a Roman Catholic revolt. The rebellion raised union to the top of the political agenda, though Castlereagh had already begun to contemplate ...”

“... correction of ‘many manifest errors’ was important, the editors say, but ‘the greater task lay in the restoration through emendation of the syntactical coherence of individual sentences as they underwent periodic amplification under the writer’s revising hand.’ And again: ‘Overwhelmingly, the changes pertain to the syntax (the flow of the ...”

“... I have delayed and fussed, despaired and dithered, and rewritten the first half several times. Paul Strohm, to whom I went for advice early on, has written and published his own in the interim.1 But perhaps at last the mist is clearing. How does one write a literary biography of a figure from the long past? My slowness has been fostered by a jumble of ...”

“... in finding a position abroad. For the next five years, Cavell was governess to the children of Paul François, a well-off Brussels lawyer. The children remembered her as a kind and imaginative teacher, but also as very proper and very English: the self-repression that would strike later acquaintances had already marked her character. To her ...”

“... the emperor was trying to make. The focus of his book is the dissimulation and hypocrisy that lay at the heart of Roman imperial politics, and had in a sense been the foundation of the governmental system established by Augustus. In making one-man rule work successfully at Rome, after almost half a millennium of (more or less) democracy, and establishing ...”

“... the means. With the Church’s approval, this new warfare, to be engaged in exclusively by lay persons, became lawful and meritorious. How new is this element of the new history? All historians of crusade operate in the shadow of the German scholar Carl Erdmann, whose great book Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, or The Origin of the Idea of ...”

“... up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists everything that is worth absorbing’. So much for those excitable fellows with their politics and their attempts to reimagine the world. I’m a devoted admirer of the fiction ...”