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“... of the Larkin oeuvre by way of his Sapphic schoolgirl jottings and taste for mannish women. For Richard Bradford, however, it’s still 1993. ‘Left-leaning commentators’, in league with ‘academics and other members of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the ...”

“... reforms turned small differences into irreconcilable antagonisms, encouraging historians to read these tendencies back into the past. McDowell points to the example of Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian and Milton’s tutor. It is often assumed that Young fled to Hamburg in 1620 because of a conflict with the Church of England, yet while in Germany ...”

“... until it’s lost? That paradise is a name for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once. But the propositions are not identical, and it’s not easy to choose among them. Can’t we look at what Proust actually wrote? We can look at what he literally wrote, but that’s not quite ...”

“... a mention. ‘Are you some kind of highclass tout?’ he asks. ‘Which books of mine have you read?’ But this dream fan is for real, or so it seems, and the two of them fall to discussing the reasons for Highwood’s neglect. The reasons, they agree, are obvious: because of his unflinching left-wing views, Highwood has been evileyed by ‘dominant ...”

“... but to engage with an experience which might otherwise have destroyed her. The scriptures she read during her captivity taught her that deliverance lay in not averting her eyes. They were her eyes. When her wound pains her, she turns to Psalm 38.5-6: ‘My wounds stink and are corrupt, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly, I go mourning all the day ...”

“... class is amusing, Jilly Cooper has not let her subject down. She quotes the Registrar General and Richard Hoggart and Michael Young, while writing in a manner that falls somewhere between Nancy Mitford and a Daily Mail column. Her characters are fun, her observations acute, and since she does not try her hand at analysis, it is hard to fault her. Yet the ...”

“... more than passive admiration. There is a 1940 portrait of Crisp in the exhibition. You can read in it the dedicated model’s preternatural awareness of self. A sitter with no talent for self-presentation could stymie the photographer. But McBean had something to offer beyond complicity with the sitter’s self-projection. He was a craftsman; his ...”

“... hellish’ onset of night as a black pall lowered without the reassuring interval of dusk. Richard Mabey stands admirably within this tradition, not only as a naturalist and writer on British flora and fauna, but as an expert on inner and outer weather: his Nature Cure (2005) records a bout of severe depression and a re-emergence two years ...”

“... are too high, supermarket prices too low; TV steals readers, except when it doesn’t (thank Richard and Judy). Nobody buys books. In fact, they do: the annual turnover of the British publishing industry is now £2.8 billion – a little more than fish or cheese and a little less than bread. That’s right, bread. The UK bread market is worth £2.9 ...”

“... And persuaded as I am that I shall not offend their modesty, for the reason that they will never read this book, it is both with childish pleasure and with a profound emotion that, being unable to record the names of so many others who undoubtedly acted in the same way, to all of whom France owes her survival, I transcribe here the real name of this ...”

“... for T.H. Huxley, ‘the natural and irreconcilable enemies of science’. His professional rival Richard Owen, by contrast, considered those blind to the beauty of design in nature to be suffering from ‘some, perhaps, congenital, defect of mind’. But the trouble with reduction to polar opposites is that what really gets excluded are the middle positions ...”

“... I do what I will … Mine enemies will I plague, my friends advance.’) In Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595), Bolingbroke returns early from banishment while his cousin Richard is in Ireland, and says that he has come only to claim his dead father’s estate and to purge the court of ...”

“... and she could be forceful even when she wasn’t spiking the drinks. Turning down an invitation to read, she wrote that her would-be hostess had ‘mistaken me for little Tich or Margaret Cooper at the piano’.The question of how she was to be received seems to have been linked, in Mew’s mind, with how she was to be remembered. In an early lyric she ...”

“... about its deliberate obscurity. It is the equivalent of shutting a door in its reader’s face. As Richard Sewall, her biographer, noted, ‘She enjoyed riddles, apparently enjoyed being one.’ But was she a riddle that wanted to be solved? Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives ...”

“... but which seems to have taken the postwar baby boomers quite by surprise. It was there to be read about in classical and modern literature, in histories, in drama, poetry and the defeated mutterings of our own grandparents and parents. But our time was different, we thought, and we seem still to think, because even now we can’t work out what ...”