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“... wife was seduced by the voracious Vita Sackville-West the poet went to his friend C.S. Lewis expecting sympathy. Lewis’s reaction on being told of the episode was fascinated silence followed by the brutal exclamation: ‘Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!’ Campbell’s male pride never recovered. Sixty years ...”

“... movie, with spectacular digital effects like Gladiator’s, only more so. It has a proper cast, with proper stars in it: Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Liv Tyler as Arwen Undómiel (the women’s parts have been beefed up somewhat). An acquaintance e-mailed to say he’d seen an early trailer in a cinema. He was so moved by the ...”

“... an ideal and a reality, as Greville and Sidney well knew, the distance may be large. When C.S. Lewis, in the Oxford History of English Literature, called Sidney ‘that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied’, he provided unwitting testimony to the success of Greville’s legend. It is only recently that the gap ...”

“... Jews would always be foreigners and honour-bound to have allegiances other than to Britain. The case that proved this to him beyond doubt was the Marconi affair of 1912, in which the attorney-general, Rufus Isaacs, profited from advance knowledge of government policy and bought shares in Marconi, his brother Godfrey’s company, shortly before it was ...”

“... to get them all going for a quarter of an hour. Descending and losing my companions I found [C.S.] Lewis alone in the smoking room and chattered with him until 1.30 a.m. ... Then I made for bed only to find Longwall Quad lit up by a bonfire composed of the Naafi canteen. I watched this for a bit and went to bed as Cleverly and the staff were putting it out ...”

“... for reaching the Moon using two modules, one to orbit, one to descend to the lunar surface. The cost of the rocket – as much as a million pounds – was far more than they could raise, but they did have enough money to make a couple of instruments for it. ‘We were in the position of someone who could not afford a car, but had enough for the speedometer ...”

“... play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long supposed to have been lost as Empson pursued his career in the East, it somehow turned up, and is certainly worth having. The poems mostly belong to the late Twenties. Some appeared in Cambridge magazines but were excluded from ...”

“... will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.’ There is no doubt that this is in the right area. Compare, for instance, Darko Suvin’s now famous definition of Science Fiction as ‘a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and ...”

“... Ramsey’s, one shared with Keynes. In philosophy: Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, the Ramsey-Lewis theory of reference, and the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of natural laws. Many of his ideas were so groundbreaking that they were taken up in earnest only decades later. This phenomenon has also been named after him: the ...”

“... Some do, some don’t, surely? Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, published in 1972 to cash in on the film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory released the year before, is based on the assumption that kids like spaceships and space monsters and they loved Willy Wonka, so let’s put Willy Wonka in orbit, throw in some space monsters, and add in ...”

“... Charles Dodgson’s right hand didn’t care to know what the left got up to. Do we have here a case of Jekyll/Hyde? Certainly the nimble Carroll seems endowed with a personality greatly at odds with that of the decorous Dodgson. And, unfortunately, after The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Dodgson succeeded in quelling his impulse towards entertaining ...”

“... are allowed to desire or hate. This is the Oedipal configuration, best known from the eponymous case that Freud wrote about, but also from the myth of the birth of the hero explored by Freud’s disciple, Otto Rank. The child’s joyful expectation of coming someday into the greatness of his parents sustains him in the present situation of humiliation and ...”

“... work, and Volume XII onwards his ethical, personal and political papers. As is often the case with this sort of multi-volume edition, the order in which the volumes have been published is somewhat erratic, but it is already clear that the series is a model of its kind – it is certainly the envy of anyone who has had to work on Wittgenstein’s ...”

“... keys to an astonished official who stood between him and the first ferry which was just about to cast off.In less than an hour, he was in Bulgaria.That same day, 10 February, Britain severed diplomatic relations with Romania. Micheline was contacted by the British Legation and told to report with the girls at the Gara de Nord before 9 p.m. on the 13th for a ...”