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“... Rothschilds. Her father, a partner in a successful clothing business, liked to go by his middle name, Henry, rather than the more Jewish Jacob. Her mother, Eliza, died when she was just four, followed, when she was nine, by an unloved stepmother (Henry’s ‘second Christian schoolteacher’, Parker’s biographer Marion Meade wryly notes). Dottie was a ...”

“... wit America had ever produced, and the writing of ‘Bartleby’, and ‘Benito Cereno’, and Billy Budd. It is – it should be – a tremendous story, perhaps the greatest in American letters, but Parker has botched it. Herman Melville is above all a family portrait. Melville is surrounded, at all times and in all places, by his relatives and ...”

“... and his dates were already there, so there wasn’t a great deal of space. There would be Jim’s name and dates of course, but there had also to be something else to signify and summarise a life. The conversations yielded seven candidates: Patriot, Trade Unionist, International Brigader, Anti-Fascist, Marxist, Socialist, Communist. There was room for two, at ...”

“... nothing but the confusion of mind of the people who compiled it. Nothing and No One deserving the name of a God could conceivably be apprehended by it.’ These thoughts are foisted on Norman Shotover, who elsewhere displays an IQ a bare couple of points above Bertie Wooster’s. Even on the formal level these satires are disappointing: after some early ...”

“... The monolith’s full name was the Ulster Unionist Party, but its position as the dominant voice of Northern Irish loyalism was such that, for most of its history, those running in its interest needed only to declare themselves ‘the Unionist candidate’. The Party’s roots were in an all-Ireland Unionist coalition which came into being in the mid-1880s in response to the rise of Parnell’s Home Rule Party ...”

“... next instant the coachman asks him for his ticket, no problem, he’s got a ticket, then for his name.His name? He’s not supposed to have to tell his name. Suddenly all his confidence is gone, as if the seat holding his back has fallen away just as the chorus does. Now he is faced with ...”

“... even if she divorces her husband, she will still one day become King Mother, in fact if not in name. And if she does convert to Rome, her sons may convert also. So the law will have to be changed. Quite right too. But how are the loyal Protestant subjects of Northern Ireland going to react to a Catholic King Billy? As ...”

“... Colley to his cabin. Colley emerges, drunk and naked but for a seaman’s shirt, supported by Billy Rogers the Handsome Sailor: he pisses against the bulwark in full view of the genteel passengers, and then turning he blesses them in the name of the Trinity. He is removed. Talbot sees him once more, still extremely ...”

“... elaborate study of the desire for initiation and the fear of exposure. The title comes from the name of the young woman who disappears in its opening pages. ‘It’s one of those horror stories you hear about,’ another character explains as the story begins to circulate. ‘She just never came home.’ Surveillance footage from the night Sabrina vanished ...”

“... fought the U-boats in the Second World War ... David’s wife Diana bore the well-known naval name of Luce, both her grandfathers being admirals ... her uncle was Admiral Sir David Luce, and her brother Richard Luce, Minister of State at the Foreign Office.’ Lineage is of course the defining preoccupation of any aristocracy, and of non-aristocrats ...”

“... were detective stories or thrillers, but occasionally there would be a straight novel, under the name of Mary Westmacott, or even a book of poems such as The Road of Dreams, published at her own expense in 1924, copies of which were still available in the Sixties. In 1930 her first play, Black Coffee, was performed; she was gradually to become more and more ...”

“... a bit surprised to hear it ‘since you see everything in terms of sex symbols … My Lord, Billy, recover your simplicity. You ain’t in Manhattan.’ She thought that poets were luckier than prose-writers if only because they weren’t generally read and therefore not generally misunderstood. All the same, some of the misunderstanding met with by ...”

“... technique, and not quite like any other in recent writing, however much it may borrow from Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, the Schlegels and Wilcoxes of Howards End. It borrows in the sense that the stories and characters deployed are mythological and exemplary, as they are in the American tradition of Hawthorne and Melville. Trilling had reverence ...”

“... was amazed. Then he sat down and laughed about it. He said two or three times: What in God’s name were we doing there?’ Aitken lets by without comment the fact that Nixon (a) thought the burglary of the Democrats’ HQ a humorous exploit and (b) immediately accepted that ‘we’ were responsible, despite his torrent of later denials. What brought ...”

“... When Gabriel Conroy arrives at the Morkans’ party, their West of Ireland maid pronounces his name in three syllables, reminding us of its Irish original ‘Conaire’. For Muldoon, this is only one of many signs of the story’s origins in the saga Togail Bruidne Da Derga, ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, via Samuel Ferguson’s ...”