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“... Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is a far better introduction than a book like King’s (‘Blake charged Thomas Butts’s son £26 5s Od per annum for engraving lessons’). Now that Frye is dead, Blake’s best living critic is Harold Bloom. If Blake’s mental forms had a life before 1757, they also had one after 1827. Arthur Symons saw this: he was interested not ...”

“... Church, but the claim would be more persuasive did not the teaching vary so greatly. The Gospel of Thomas, probably composed about the middle of the century, consists of short sayings and parables of Jesus, some of them derived from, or at any rate parallel to, those known from the New Testament, others hitherto unknown and including a few which may well be ...”

“... one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort of ...”

“... in less workaday genres. So she has Lizzy dealing with Mrs Reynolds, who helps her keep house, Thomas Bidwell, who polishes her candlesticks, and Mrs Donovan, who looks after her children. And she has Lizzy worrying about Napoleon, remedying a lack of interest in the world that modern critics have thought disappointing or at least odd (though this was ...”

“... more consideration here than do some of the run of the mill Authorised Version spin-offs, such as Thomas Macklin’s six-volume Bible published in 1800. Macklin’s doorstopper included 71 prints engraved from Biblical pictures by contemporary artists such as Joshua Reynolds, and so offers more to the aesthetic bibliophile than those versions that people ...”

“... in the last chapter reproductions of topographical drawings done in the last century by William Henry Holmes and Turner’s supposed student, Thomas Moran. They may be faulted on minutiae of physical detail, but Holmes’s sense of the material structure of the Canyon is uncanny, and Moran, had he been reproduced in ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... culture.’ I do not think that the Europe of Hildegard of Bingen, Ramon Llull, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, Catherine of Siena, John of the Cross, Henry Vaughan, Blaise Pascal, George Fox, Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, William Law, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Bernardette, among tens of thousands of ...”

“... September, rumours were rife in Conservative circles that he was not proving very good at the job. Henry Fairlie, for instance, was writing in the Spectator that ‘there is no point in concealing the fact that his first six months in office have not been encouraging.’ More and more criticisms were being made – ‘by those who know’ – of Eden’s ...”

“... at the beginning of the century. Partly, this may be explained in the words once written by Keith Thomas: ‘if magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it.’ Democratic politicians have eyes bigger than their ...”

“... then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal match with the French King’s brother, Francois, Duke of Anjou. It ...”

“... a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, chaired by the rector of Imperial College, Henry Tizard. For whatever reason – but probably because neither Tizard nor his chosen colleagues liked him – Lindemann wasn’t invited, and it took a grand remonstrance from Churchill to get him there. Now began some terrific rows. Lindemann resented the ...”

“... of 1857 had underlined. As Meyer and Brysac indicate, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, directed by Henry Hathaway and released in 1935, was Hitler’s favourite film. (Mussolini’s Motion Picture Bureau banned it, deeming it to be pro-British propaganda.) Major Francis Yeats-Brown’s book, whose title the film borrowed, was a memoir of life as an officer in ...”

“... Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American beau monde nor Eakins’s moral passion at the ...”

“... remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ...”