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“... at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey along with the Prime Minister, Kipling, Shaw, Housman, Barrie, Galsworthy, and the Masters of the Queen’s College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge – all of whom (with the exception of the dons) I recall as slightly marring the solemnity of the occasion by irresistibly suggesting a group of ...”

“... exercised good judgment; he did not display it in 1906, though, when he decided to marry Mrs Nancy Shaw, née Langhorne, from Virginia, who had recently divorced her impossible and drunken husband. She had wanted merely a separation, but had been forced into a divorce by her husband’s family’s discovery that he had married again and was about to be ...”

“... obscene’. So it is a comfort to find all these cruelties belied in the portrait of Moore by John Butler Yeats, reproduced in Gray’s book. There sits a harmless, walrus-moustached gentleman of 53, a little melancholy in expression, but by no means satyr-like, fresh-from-the-womb or squiffy. The year of the portrait was 1905, when Moore, surprisingly ...”

“... 16 proposals; but then, she was only 17 when she accepted, and 18 when she married 24-year-old Bob Shaw. He was the playboy son of a rich Bostonian family and kept a permanent mistress. Nancy found she hated sex. She was still complaining about it after she had borne a daughter and four sons to her second husband, Waldorf Astor, and she ‘proudly’ informed ...”

“... couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the ...”

“... moment is Yeats’s dishevelled plea to his sweetheart Maud Gonne not to marry the loutish John MacBride, who was to become one of the executed rebels of the Easter Rising. Here, under intense emotional pressure, Yeats’s spelling packs up almost completely, along with his grammar and syntax, collapsing into a garbled semiosis which Julia Kristeva ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does ...”

“... Department officials. It offered ‘balanced’ debates on the issues between far right hawks like John Tower, and moderate hawks like John Mearsheimer, and rigorously excluded the views of anti-war representatives. (CNN’s subsequent release, via Turner Home Entertainment, of videotape ‘highlights’ of its war coverage ...”

“... pain’, though he adds that, if it is true that ‘classical utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mill used “pleasure” ... to include achieving what one desired’ and vice versa, then ‘the difference between classical utilitarianism and utilitarianism based on interests disappears.’ In fact, achieving what one desires is not always ...”

“... He was subjected to even more abuse from the British press and public than Nasser or John Foster Dulles. In a widely photographed incident, Altrincham was physically assaulted. His assailant shouted to the pressmen he had summoned to watch: ‘This is for insulting the Queen!’ The papers – except the Times, which on advice from the palace ...”

“... in his belief that Maud Gonne’s beauty was of ‘a kind not natural in an age like this’. Shaw called her ‘outrageously beautiful’ and W.T. Stead, who could no more than Yeats isolate his admiration for her looks from an appraisal of her politics, described her as ‘one of the most beautiful women in the world’, going on to point out that ...”

“... you as a smiling machine both a purring cat and a fixture – and then in a letter rejecting John Bull’s Other Island said you had for the first time ‘a geographical conscience’ – which means your other island savoured of the earth had even the oily tremor of bogland – I guess he meant to imply that all the rest – all your other plays ...”

“... were created, you feel, so that Kiberd could play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama ...”

“... bands briefly attracted some of the less snobbish ‘serious’ composers: notably Elgar, Holst, John Ireland and Herbert Howells. The two indefatigable journalist/ entrepreneurs of the movement, Cope and the championship organiser Herbert Whiteley, played a leading part in persuading Holst and Elgar to write for the bands. They coaxed from them, among other ...”

“... organ to play on. He ought to have a statue.’ It was left to a few critics like George Bernard Shaw to question not only the popularity of oratorio but its ability to present the right kind of message. Piety was confused with respectability, and the music was more usually compared with anthems, some of which were drawn from oratorios, than with ...”