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“... the two most important architects of the Versailles peace settlement, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, both acknowledged Mazzini’s inspiration. According to Lloyd George, ‘the map of Europe as we see it today is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality ... He taught us not merely the rights ...”

“... there: ‘Then after supper it is usual for him to read a little of Venus and Adonis, the jests of George Peele, or some such scurrilous book: for there are few idle pamphlets printed in England which he hath not in the house.’ The Rape of Lucrece is less obviously licentious – and certainly much less fun – but for all its moralising, there is a good ...”

“... also she wanted the messenger alive, to hear from him that Octavia was old and ugly. Lady Macbeth would have killed Duncan as he slept, except that he resembled her father; she did at least incriminate the grooms by smearing them with blood, though later she was troubled with thick-coming fancies that kept her from her rest. And in real, recent ...”

“... the City are anonymous and, apart from a cripple trying to revert to infancy, all grimly stoical. Macbeth and Lear have earned their hell by wrong actions. In Thomson’s hell nobody has been notably wicked. Some remember an existence in which they tried to fight injustice or do good things, but having wakened ‘to this real night’ they know memory is an ...”

“... desire for direct contact with the public, and the same is true of the novels, in which, as George Eliot put it, ‘he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium.’ Powerful theatre managers had to be dealt with, like Marplay in The Author’s Farce, but according to the theatre historian Robert Hume, ‘Fielding quickly made himself the most ...”

“... himself. He was an enfant terrible in the theatre, with adaptations of Shakespeare, a negro Macbeth, a famous Mercury Julius Caesar and the banned The cradle will rock by Marc Blitzstein. The notorious radio production of The War of the Worlds and his epic compilation of Shakespeare’s History plays, Five Kings, convinced Hollywood that they wanted him ...”

“... Twist was ‘the TRUTH!’ Even Tolstoy needed at times to make the same point. Henry James or George Eliot, on the other hand, never give the impression that the question could arise: the distinction was not part of their artistic outlook or method. But as a touchstone it is still very much around, and can take unexpected forms. Importunity about truth ...”

“... tone of the allusion is unfathomable (what are we supposed to do with the murderous mendacity of Macbeth?), and the tone of the last half-dozen words comes out not as a shouldering but as a shrugging. Tone has to do a great deal of the work – complemented by principle – once the enterprise is not only non-theoretical but anti-theoretical. Enright’s ...”

“... world still permeate the forest. He remembers school excursions to the New Forest with his friend George Peterken, and how he was taken by Peterken, now a famous woodland ecologist, to see the small-leaved limes of St Briavel’s Common, which creep along the banks ‘like the walking wood in Macbeth’. He even tells the ...”

“... cinematic speed.‘We Russians have two countries,’ Dostoevsky wrote in an essay on the death of George Sand: ‘Our Russia and Europe, even when we call ourselves Slavophiles.’ Nabokov thought a sentimental and reactionary vision of Russia won out too often in Dostoevsky’s work, or perhaps he meant to suggest only that too many readers celebrated the ...”

“... influence of a good smoke on the writing capacities of Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Compton Mackenzie, he poses the large question whether ‘with abstainers multiplying, we may soon have to ask whether literature is going to become impossible – or has already begun to be impossible.’ It’s increasingly obvious, as one ...”

“... like Prospero’s. Prospero is one of The Humbling’s household gods. Attempting a Tempest/Macbeth double bill at the Kennedy Center, the 65-year-old protagonist, Simon Axler, ‘the last of the best of the classical American stage actors’, is suddenly abandoned by his talent. No reason is given – there is no reason – and Axler suffers a ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the ...”

“... confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles estate, or at least ...”

“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”