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“... obsessed with its own version of English continuity. As Cairns Craig has argued in Cencrastus, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson see class struggle as fundamental to English history, but conceive that history to be ‘shaped as an autonomous inner trajectory defined by the conflicts and the accommodations between classes which do not need to be understood ...”

“... essentially vulgar displays like the recent book and play on Hitler by George Steiner and Christopher Hampton. Only books of a very exceptional kind – Solzhenitsyn’s and the memoirs of Mandelstam’s widow – can confront the nature of the tyranny directly, and they do so, not by the poetic word, but by putting first-hand experience in order with ...”

“... I’m compelled to die, where others survive and live; For my only food is what flares up and burns, And that which others die from, I need to live. As Saslow explains, Michelangelo derives this image from a Petrarchan oxymoron: the salamander which was said to feed on death and live in flames. Saslow also notes that Michelangelo refers to Cavalieri in a ...”

“... he is sighted in London in May 1612, giving evidence in a lawsuit involving his former landlord Christopher Mountjoy, and again in March 1613 when he signed the mortgage deed on a property in the Blackfriars.* The two performances in 1613 bring Cardenio close to the Shakespeare-Fletcher Henry VIII, which was first performed at the Globe in June 1613. It was ...”

“... arrives at Ramsdale, it is to stay with the McCoo family, but, on the day, the McCoo house burns down and Mr McCoo brings the bad news to Humbert’s hotel – ‘distraught’ and ‘in wet clothes’. My italics. The prodigality reminds me of Emily Dickinson: As if I asked a common Alms, And in my wondering hand A Stranger pressed a Kingdom, And ...”

“... man’. Most Shakespeareans remain utterly unpersuaded by any of this, and the letters printed by Christopher Reid in his excellent 2007 collection show that Hughes was both wounded and unsurprised by the professional response: ‘What a pity the Times didn’t give my book to somebody who wasn’t straitjacketed inside the English Tripos,’ he wrote to the ...”

“... is now about, aided and abetted by the ever more reverent media. When Secretary of State Warren Christopher said in front of journalists that King Hussein’s grandfather – murdered outside the al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in 1951 – had ‘died for peace’, no one challenged this historically untrue assertion. King Abdullah was shot down by a ...”

“... material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher Isherwood, and proposed that he should provide her with a substitute by marrying her. Isherwood backing down, Auden – who all his life seems to have retained and exercised his own very special form of gentlemanliness – had the buck passed on to ...”

“... a man haunted by the whole troubled (and unresolved) matter of his older half-brother, Terry Burns. It was Terry who had introduced the young David Jones to Buddhism, Beat poetry, Mingus, and who later slipped or snapped into genuine psychosis, to lead a cruel jacitation of a life until his eventual suicide in 1985. Bowie himself played with and ...”

“... the use of it or where is the amusement to be derived? Then they say, we have bought your cousin Christopher a shooting range! A shooting range? I open my mouth and bawl. Shooting range!Well! I can hear them saying. She did make a fuss! We had to give it her!The shooting range consisted of a metal bar, which you placed on the carpet. On this bar swung four ...”

“... he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did like Venice: ‘elvishly lovely’, he said. He loathed ‘that ...”

“... began pouring down his walls from a flooded flat above him. At 6.20, he got a call from his son, Christopher, who was outside, saying that a fire chief wanted to speak to him.‘Mate,’ the firefighter said. ‘Get ready. Someone is coming to get you.’ He heard a knock at the door and it was them. Two firemen.‘How many are in here?’ one of them ...”