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“... own lips and passing it to Bette Davis (Now, Voyager). With approval, he cites the mass meeting of young women at Teheran University; every pouting lip framing a cigarette in protest at a Khomeini fatwah against smoking for females. In spite of the misogyny of certain styles of smoking (pipes, of course, and Rudyard Kipling’s hearty attitude towards cigars ...”

“... my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth birthday I asked for a glass-fronted ...”

“... Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, with a line-up of largely unknown young male artists they called ‘the studs’. As Chicago later put it, ‘no women artists were taken seriously. The men sat around Barney’s and talked about cars, motorcycles and their joints. I knew nothing about cars, less about motorcycles, and certainly ...”

“... arms and armour, he stood in the chilly drizzle over what was said to be the grave of King Arthur and chanted an extended, improvised rabbinical-druidic hymn. It evoked the strength and innocence of Blake’s Albion and ended on what seemed to me, at the time, a strange remark, perhaps a challenge hurled from king to king: ‘British poets are ...”

“... intervention. He made a mortal enemy of the rival claimant, Menelik, the ambitious and clever young ruler of the southern kingdom of Shoa. Menelik’s power was significantly enhanced by his marriage in 1883 to Taytu Betul, which gave him the support of her influential kinsmen in the north. The acquisition in 1887 of the city of Harar, situated 300 miles ...”

“... planning utopias have never been popular except with political elites. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Family and Kinship in East London (1957), painted a dire picture of community warmth in the old East End giving way to anomie and alienation in the new towns to which bombed-out families were forced to move. In the end, the destruction of European ...”

“... and Irving Kristol, émigré Russians such as Nicolas Nabokov, and former Cominternists such as Arthur Koestler – had their formative cultural and political experiences back in the 1930s or even earlier, and jumped ship either after the purges or with the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Given that the US was a latecomer to the European culture wars, it may ...”

“... early reviews must have made depressing reading for a beleaguered poet. Everybody remembers that Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of ...”

“... had been confiscated from Deutsche Bank. Another claimant to Mosul’s oil had to be placated. Sir Arthur Hirtzel, head of the political department at the India Office, wrote in February 1919, as the final touches were put to the postwar settlement, that ‘it should be borne in mind that the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over Iraq.’ The ...”

“... Fyfes and of her own childhood. Lehmann was good on children, especially the anxieties of the very young. She was good, too, on the mixed moods of life, less commonly found in fiction: the nostalgia of adolescence in Dusty Answer, or, much later in The Echoing Grove, the interplay of habit and passion when a married couple fall asleep in the middle of a ...”

“... Waves) and even Rudyard Kipling, as well as those of others mentioned by Luckhurst, such as Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee and Grant Allen. The concept of telepathy continually threatened to collapse distinctions between the literal and the figural, and the psychological and the metaphysical. As Luckhurst remarks, Henry James ‘always ensures the screw will ...”

“... of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which some barristers are prone, it is almost unknown for them to become notorious for their bacchanalian lifestyles. So why is it that George ...”

“... Or a caste. There’s the Vidal who appears in Two Sisters and the Vidal who appears as his young self in his Roosevelt novel, The Golden Age. There’s the ventriloquist Vidal, recognisable in some of his historical characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal ...”

“... designed by his best modellers. In this classicised allegory of colonial success, Hope, a young woman in flowing robes, reaches out to Peace with her olive branch, Art with her palette, and Labour, with a sledgehammer over his shoulder. A ship in the background shows the arrival of the colonists while a horn of plenty spills its contents onto the ...”

“... such an idle reprobate would provoke Johnson’s censure. But the lightly sketched portrait of young Minim appears in a journal whose title commits it to defending a life of easy wins, as long as that life cannot hurt anyone. The key lesson of Minim’s petty existence is that – however malicious his intentions – he remains innocent of damage. Johnson ...”