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“... to attempt it. For, as he saw it, everything that could be said had already been said – by Frank Harris and others, including Shaw himself; and although Wilde was ‘incomparably great as a raconteur, and as a personality ... these points cannot be reproduced.’ There is obviously some truth in this; we can hardly imagine what it must have been like to know ...”

“... winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables ...”

“... a different matter. ‘Above Tooey Mountain’, for example, interweaves letters from Hopkins, James Joyce’s mother and Sir James Melville with the poet’s own experience of motherhood: the pay-off is too much like an Ian Hamilton poem (arms damp with flowers ‘from holding them so long’), but the narrative leaps ...”

“... about being an ill-educated ‘peasant’. Nevertheless he seized on Heraclitus, Hopkins and James Joyce in particular in his one year as a student and developed demanding tastes in music, literature and art. Graham became a farm-labourer in Galway, travelled with a fair and worked on the docks in Dublin to avoid conscription in 1939, but failed his Army ...”

“... to help arrange a meeting at Ruskin College where Cliff spoke and was seconded by C.L.R. James, who made an electrifying speech on the reality of imperialist war. If it seemed faintly improbable, on the cusp of 1968, to believe in a group that advocated revolution without illusions, at least one could see every day that the careerist supporters of ...”

“... is limited and it is hardly a complaint to say that some significant details could be added. A Mr Harris, for instance, about whom nothing is known save that he married the daughter of a British consul in Naples, is included, and it could have been mentioned that for want of an Anglican clergyman the ceremony was conducted by none other than the great German ...”

“... I first came across James Boyce five years ago, when he wrote the lead essay in a collection called Whitewash, intended to argue against the ruthlessly revisionist ‘frontier history’ of Keith Windschuttle. In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), Windschuttle had argued that, contrary to the claims of various ideologically driven left-leaning historians, very few Tasmanian Aborigines had died in conflict with whites ...”

“... the appearance of Animal Farm in the previous year, and publication of his essays on nationalism, James Burnham, and the totalitarian approach to literature, in the short-lived but influential magazine Polemic. This is not just nit-picking. That first appreciation of Orwell as an important writer and original thinker was a socio-literary one, and so was the ...”

“... alive) like the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual ...”

“... men as friends, although – according to them – she sometimes flung herself at their heads. Jed Harris, who produced The Lake and took all the money he could off her, seems to have been an infatuation who also brutally undermined her confidence. But she got over him. And she always had a steady girlfriend. The later entanglement with Spencer Tracy owed much ...”

“... in 1797 must for a while have made marriage uncontemplatable by the younger, and devoted, sister. Harris Bigg-Wither she refused because, the Memoir says, he had every advantage ‘except the subtle power of touching her heart’. She later endorsed this as just cause both through Fanny Price’s thoughts and in a letter to the real-life Fanny who was her ...”

“... And if I do so, it is because my version of events has a relevance to the immediate past when James Callaghan agreed to Chevaline without telling most of the Cabinet, let alone the Labour Party, and when Margaret Thatcher with the solitary aid of Cecil Parkinson conducted the major decisions of the Falklands War. It so happens that Arthur Tedder was a ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... But the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made her popular, and that he kept her work continually in ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I didn’t ...”