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“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which female midgets play the harpsichord and tend the shrubberies. For the English the ideal society needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751) locates ...”

“... to, almost, the present day, each one made to stand for a particular type of donnish character: John Henry Newman (‘The Charismatic Don’); Maurice Bowra (‘The Don as Wit’); George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme ...”

“... out crown and anchor games’; ‘I was a policeman trying to stop people sending flowers from Cornwall to London by rail’; ‘I worked for the London County Council making sure that fan-dancers gave nothing away, and that comics were not corrupting servicemen with dirty jokes.’ (Not all enforcers were against dirty jokes. Was there not a censor ...”

“... be said after all of Homer and Iris Murdoch. Dora tells us that Woolf’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, which inspired the setting of To the Lighthouse, belonged to an age of ‘elite seaside tourism’ that came to an end only in the 20th century with ‘the emergence of neo-Romantic taste for picturesque sceneries and for the past’. But the Victorians ...”

“... was on the point of getting betrothed when he finally premiered King Lear. (She married Dr John Hall in 1607, the year between Lear’s performance at court and its publication.) Biographers have pointed out, too, that Shakespeare had a younger brother called Edmund, who followed him to London and into the theatre business. Did Shakespeare name the ...”

“... N.D.’ – Agnes (Nessie) Dunsmuir, a girl Graham had met at college. Nessie went to live in Cornwall with Graham in 1944 in a pair of caravans belonging to Graham’s previous girlfriend, Mary Harris. Harris and Graham had briefly been colleagues at Kilquhanity progressive school in Galloway and, even more briefly, cohabitants in ...”

“... Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original works of its kind, a detailed and sensitive rescuing of its subject from the Victorian silence that entombed him. In writing about Symonds, historian of the Renaissance, Ms Grosskurth ...”

“... led to Thorpe’s disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession with John Pardoe, gave David Steel an almost impossible task. He was 39, but looked younger, a slight figure with an easy smile, a son of the Scottish manse, neither obviously at home with scholars, like Grimond, or in London society, like Thorpe. ‘The boy ...”

“... Gaelic genius, from its origin in Georgia to its modern expression in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Galicia and the Pays Basque’. The self-evident rottenness of the timber that stokes the fire is beside the point: what matters is the fire, the heat of it and the light it throws. (Which is not to deny that in the case of poets better than either ...”

“... had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne. However, he allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a party appointment. Without doubt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) fitted that bill. He had worked long and hard for the Liberals in his native ...”

“... have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and morally – Sandhurst and the years in India and Africa ‘must be counted among ...”

“... find it hard to do so – for instance, when Falstaff disappears, or rather turns into Sir John Oldcastle, since it is known that in early performances (though not in any printed form of the plays) that is what he was called. Oldcastle’s descendants protested, and the consequence was the presumably unique disclaimer in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV. The ...”

“... believed that the planters ‘ought to be scrupulously attended to, as if they were farmers in Cornwall or in Yorkshire’ and were ‘entitled to the same protection in their persons and fortunes, as our brethren’ at home. What good would come, he and others asked, if the British sugar market was given over willingly to East Indians? What would happen ...”

“... In any event he would have been pleased to return home to Austin, where – after his childhood in Cornwall and degree at Oxford and teaching in Zürich and London – he had been living for the last fifty years. He owned a flash pair of cowboy boots, but not a Stetson. Austin and the University of Texas were at their very best when Middleton arrived there in ...”