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“... as a governess in Russia, accepting hardship and insecurity as the price of independence. Agnes Porter earned the respect and affection of her wealthy employers and fought hard, and finally successfully, to secure a long promised and richly earned pension. Ellen Weeton’s life was blighted, but it was marriage with a violent man, not her work as a ...”

“... English. Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned, speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James, all qualifications and revisions, no assertion that can’t be infinitely embroidered or unravelled. But he also deals in violence, historical and personal, and in the movie titles, politicians, brand-names and underwear we connect with a quite ...”

“... purely private mission of exploration it might be right for the Englishman to execute a bad native porter to encourage the others.’ In his last novel, Sick Heart River (1941), described by his secretary as ‘so unlike him, so introspective’, the dying Sir Edward Leithen spends his last days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of ...”

“... an obsessive labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times ...”

“... she describes is familiar, and memorable, and can be recognised more generally. The pages of Henry James, for example, are full of a sexual desire he has ‘forgotten’ in this sense, that is, neither shouted out nor encrypted nor entirely repressed, just allowed to slip beyond the reach of his conscious word-choices. In her very sharp introduction to ...”

“... officers in uniform, the prettiest officer making the most of his cheeks’. Or: ‘on a sofa the porter found himself damp and it was not last night’s smell.’ Or: ‘a fart for moralists’. Or: ‘Paul Veronese. he suddenly ejaculated, You know Veronese – above the sideboard. up in the cupboard on the wall; On the contrary.’ Or, more simply: ‘up ...”

“... The troubles at the LSE go back a long way. Perhaps they began on the day in July 1894 when Henry Hutchinson shot himself, thus activating the terms of the will that he had made. A loyal if morose member of the Fabian Society from Derby, Hutchinson had stipulated that the bulk of his sizeable fortune – say a million in today’s money – should be applied by his executors ‘to the propaganda and other purposes of the said Society and its Socialism ...”

“... intelligence required to make proper use of that knowledge’. Nice work if you can do it, as Cole Porter didn’t quite say. Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divination – even and especially of secular affairs. He would like to believe we could do without such obliquities. He is touched ...”

“... Mania’. But he should have been better served by his editor. At one point the book calls Henry Brougham ‘Lord Henry Brougham’, which he never was, and then calls him ‘Lord Brougham’ some twenty years before he left the House of Commons to become lord chancellor in Grey’s Reform Bill administration. The ...”

“... entry of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks himself: ‘don’t I get an effect from Folkestone?’ James does indeed get an ‘effect’, in What Maisie Knew, from Folkestone: from the name, from the town, from its seaside hotel, from the ...”

“... racism, given at a 1943 New York rally on a bill with Paul Robeson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. Welles’s debut as a political orator was as sensational in its way as his first forays into theatre and the movies. ‘Until the other day,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an ...”

“... The first time​ Tetty Porter met her future husband, Samuel Johnson, she told her daughter, Lucy, that she had never encountered a more ‘sensible’ man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance ...”

“... poetry ‘must now be positive and prophetic’, and discovering those qualities in the work of Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. For him, apocalypse was always in the air or round the corner, and he had ‘something in the nature of an apocalyptic experience’ when he came across a drawing by a five-year-old girl in which he instantly recognised a ...”

“... to write poems.’ Richler includes some grimly beautiful counter-examples, among them Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, a poem which incorporates Adorno’s point:                     Such death, says the painter, is worthwhile – it makes a colour never known. It makes a sight that’s unimagined, says the poet. To ...”

“... in a cabaret, pastrycook, locksmith, coppersmith, mechanic, workman, labourer, wharf porter, servant, sandwich man, sign painter, house decorator, journalist, photographer’, as Romain Rolland described him, Istrati was a critic of Soviet society who was denounced by the Comintern denigration and, like Victor Serge, abused as an ‘anti-Moscow ...”