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“... good money as a dressmaker and hen-keeper. Her husband Michael Cleary was an educated and literate cooper, whose services were much in demand by local businesses. He had served his apprenticeship in the progressive town of Clonmel and had good prospects. As a couple, they seemed the very image of a modernising Ireland and were singled out by the authorities as ...”

“... combination of these things has been explosive. The queen stuck to tradition. She wouldn’t let William wear his army uniform on his wedding day. When Harry told her, alone by the tailgate of a Range Rover on the Sandringham estate, that he intended to marry Meghan Markle, she dubiously gave her assent, but didn’t embrace him or shake his hand, and I ...”

“... any arrest which started the trouble but the arrest of the son of a Jamaican car-worker, Leroy Cooper, who was already seeking civil damages against the Chief Constable of Merseyside for the alleged harassment of his other son. Such incidents do not ‘justify’ riot, but they do invite us to consider the violence which follows neither as an inevitable ...”

“... on Coward, one he willingly acknowledged. His discovery of the stories came in 1915 via Eva Astley Cooper (‘a kind of Ottoline Morrell of the Midlands’), in whose undistinguished Victorian mansion, Hambleton Hall, he was recuperating from TB. At Hambleton there were house parties to which Mrs Cooper invited noted ...”

“... a neglected text, strangely ignored by British and American medieval literary scholarship, so W.R. Cooper’s modern-spelling edition of the freer version of its New Testament is welcome, even though some of his modernisations are difficult to understand. He changes clepe to ‘call’, brenne to ‘burn’ and han to ‘have’, but retains such easily ...”

“... to the widespread use of Blair’s Rhetoric in the United States. By the early 1760s, the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon ...”

“... went on exhibition at the Tate. Then Hirst won the Turner Prize. According to one of the jury, William Feaver, who is quoted by Spalding, this was ‘for panache and effrontery ... He has been the leading brainstormer of his generation of artists, a goad and corrective, showing up the solemnity of professional art curators while demonstrating that art’s ...”

“... to be ‘maiden ladies and foreigners with long hair, and educated Englishmen did not sing’. Sir William Henry Hadow, a leading educational reformer after the First World War, remembered the schooling he had received in the 1870s by noting that music had beenthe reluctant substitute for cricket, all the more bitter because it carried the suspicion of an ...”

“... Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries chosen as the outstanding works ...”

“... and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a Presbyterian parsonage. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, from which these titbits come, provides further unwitting refutations of its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It ...”

“... little deformity so much as turns to her.’ This was Diana Manners, writing to her fiancé, Duff Cooper, in 1919. ‘Her’ was Venetia Montagu, the light of Herbert Asquith’s life when he was prime minister, but now sharing a Paris hotel room with a small, grinning Canadian millionaire. This ‘deformity’ was Max Aitken, still only forty but already ...”

“... a polemical framework which is all the more effective for being padded and partially covered. As William Gass pointed out in 1986 when this book was published to rapturous reviews in the United States, Home contains an assault on the ‘modern’ that conforms to type. It appeals to ‘us’, the long-suffering public, and it points the finger at ...”

“... males can rewrite a life. Schreiner gets into the DNB as an appendix to her lawyer brother William. William is not mentioned in the Companion entry, even as an appendix. The Companion is careful to note that Olive’s mother, ‘a brilliant, exacting Englishwoman’, ‘once beat her for using an Afrikaans ...”

“... I seem to think best in collision with other people’s thoughts. In a biography of Lady Diana Cooper, once said to be the most beautiful woman in England and by many accounts one of the most wittily charming, I read a snippet from one of Lady Diana’s letters to a friend: It’s not my nature to be quiet. I have no wealth within me. All stimulus has to ...”

“... its competence – was ‘born unfree’. Staggering in its own way is the acute perception of Sir William Wade, who held chairs in law at both Oxford and Cambridge, that the Union was originally understood to be the ‘fundamental law’ of the new British state, but ‘the Treaty was made too early, and the argument has been raised too late, for this ...”