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“... quality in her so as to catch it on film. But Gardner, who had been obviously shy when she was young, was still secretly shy when older, and even oddly shy before the camera. As a result, although she always looked pretty, at first she was a wooden performer. She became an actor when she found a way of presenting herself on screen, the self she presented ...”

“... empire’, you begin to think he is just hankering for the old days and another life, when a young American – he was only 35 at the time – could have an archduke for a cousin, like the girl called Marie at the beginning of The Waste Land, and a whole set of memories to go with such aristocratic connections. There is a good deal of nonsense along ...”

“... process) ‘the mystical period’. Slowness runs a typically ferocious 18th-century story of a young man being exploited one night by a noblewoman (it’s called Point de lendemain or No Tomorrow) against a chaotic contemporary one where Vincent meets Julie, they get undressed (‘Take off your clothes!’) by a hotel swimming pool, he promises her ‘a ...”

“... of speech to literal life in a way that marks Peake’s art. In a French novel he would be the young man from the provinces, an avatar of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel. He is a wonderful fictional creation because Peake’s strong sense of Steerpike’s evil and the damage he does – by the end of the second novel he has killed six people – is quite at odds ...”

“... to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare was an unmitigatedly boring and unhelpful witness. The young couple whose hand-fast betrothal he had personally conducted, deprived of the dowry about which he remained so irresponsibly vague, can’t have had a very high opinion of his gifts as a marriage-broker either. He wasn’t even consistent, forgetting the ...”

“... Davis is quite literal (‘my believing youth’), and the first Scott Moncrieff has ‘when I was young and had faith’.Then the Fall comes – another thing that happens in gardens. The old carriages are gone, and people are driving cars. No mythological horses – just, to take Proust literally again, ‘moustached mechanics’. The women have terrible ...”

“... he never ceased to milk his memory for flagrantly sentimental recollections. For the 1964 Election Michael Foot wrote a Bevanite hagiography of Wilson, which he quickly expunged from his own Who’s Who entry (the opposite of the Kinnock technique) when Wilson’s Government, despite the presence in high office of Crossman and Barbara Castle, proved a ...”

“... a revolution from the left is on the agenda at all in the coming two decades, Mr Scargill and his young miners will be the best place to turn for leadership and for the Red Guards. That seems to me to be the best case that can be advanced for the defence of the NUM leadership. It is not all a matter of pure advocacy: many of the points Scargill makes about ...”

“... now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete 12-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters and Slater’s own editions of Dickens’s journalism. But Slater is a career Dickensian, not a popular ...”

“... Friedrich Hölderlin was rescued from oblivion by a young German scholar called Norbert von Hellingrath, who wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and began the first historical-critical edition of his works. In 1915, a year before he died at Verdun, Hellingrath delivered a lecture describing Hölderlin as ‘the most German of Germans’, whose luminous hymns confide their message ‘only to the select few’ and remain ‘perhaps never penetrable to non-Germans ...”

“... enteric disorder in Mexico. ‘There is much to be said for enjoying ill-health when one is young,’ he says. ‘One learns not ... to take it too seriously’. Yet as he is handed on from host to host, you realise that there is more to him than his connections. Steven Runciman is enchanting company. The art of travel is, whenever possible, to repay ...”

“... Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of well-known writers, and it’s ...”

“... like the one where my parents live, were lassoed by Hampshire North-West, which Sir George Young (Con, obviously) retained in 2001 with a swollen majority of 12,009. Ever decreasing turn-out probably didn’t help Hunter: Basingstoke’s citizens have followed the national trend of not bothering to vote, though they’ve always been slightly more ...”

“... and reassuringly familiar to its audience, each episode, according to its recent presenter Kirsty Young, ‘a well-tethered hammock’ cradling itself ‘around each highly individual guest’.For decades the famous and worthy, or would-be worthy, have queued up to appear on it. On his death in 1965, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee’s heir presumptive for ...”

“... she escapes from the ‘dull slavery’ of her job by becoming the trophy wife of the elderly Sir Michael Audley and the mistress of his magnificent house, Audley Court. Although she is a helpless-looking blonde, the epitome of the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’, Lady Audley is strong and determined, and when her position is threatened by her first ...”