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“... child was Georgiana’s (the event has echoes of the ‘warming-pan affair’ which embarrassed James II’s Queen). Having given her husband a long-wanted male heir, the Duchess naturally expected him to pay off her prodigious gambling debts. This he failed to do. Soon she became pregnant again, this time by a future prime minister, Earl Grey, who in years ...”

“... questions about the mysteries of the Devil gets such good historical answers. From Tymms (1949) to Miller (1985) to the touchingly named Herdman (is he trying to keep us safe, inside the yard?) the literary study of doubles roots itself in Christian accounts of the world, describing how, by trick, by election or by sin, characters break open, split apart, see ...”

“... part in a number of notorious sectarian killings. It is estimated that some two hundred members or ex-members of the regiment were convicted of criminal offences during its first ten years. At the centre of the debate about paramilitary collusion with the security forces is the belief held by both Catholics and Protestants that the law is not enforced when the ...”

“... the memory of one’s spouse that gives adultery its dirty kick? (In a poem called ‘Adultery’, James Dickey, who knew whereof he spoke, concluded: ‘Guilt is magical.’) Why are ‘peccadillos’ deemed part of the devil’s handiwork? (Most peccadillos are as harmless as hobbies.) Is a belt easier to swipe than, say, a pair of cashmere socks or a bottle ...”

“... used to go out on the town together, bar-hopping, up to God knows what. Behaviour of Henry Miller buddies. But, however scabrous the circumstances, Brooks never lost a thoroughly un-Millerian elegance and self-irony and when she finally took up her pen and wrote, in her sixties and seventies, she wrote, not about life in the lower depths, but about her ...”

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

“... their mark. All the more of a pity that two very distinctive women, Christian Watt and Christian Miller, are out. Perhaps the limitations on formal schooling for women were an advantage. It certainly seems that those chosen to be here did not express themselves in stiff school-taught English and standard phraseology. Such a form of expression casts a ...”

“... to win through to crazy age, with its ‘something yet’: he died young, at the age of 37 – en poète, as he put it – of a rheumatic affliction of the heart caused or assisted, it would seem, both by work and by drink. So you could say that he was never anything but young, and that his youth was sustained by his art, his friends and his lovers. His ...”

“... pale Hawksmoor is an inhabitant of the present day who reminds one not only of Dyer but of P.D. James’s recurrent character Inspector Dalgliesh – one of her novels, A Taste for Death, published the following year, has a church murder in London, draped in the poses of this sensitive, cultivated policeman, and it also has, like Hawksmoor, a suspected ...”

“... The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a modest, clean, unadorned English than to the tenets of academe. Metaphor and pretty prose were not much favoured. In another part of the forest, some writers were questioning the plainness ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... James Merrill​ has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to boot. Merrill would have hated to be the subject of a plodding biography. He was all about stylishness and elegance, in poetry and in life ...”

“... pulpit. It does contain subtleties, even in the brass section, but it’s seldom averse to a yell. James Hogg could sound polished when he felt like it, but he was thought noisy by the aspiring Edinburgh gentry. They were eager for lessons in belletristic politeness, and knew he could be vulgar and uncouth. He knew they knew it, too. Hogg was a ...”

“... missing killer Swathed in lianas are abruptly found. One day no doubt they’ll bump into Glenn Miller, So many scribes are covering the ground. He’ll be with Harold Holt and all the rest Back to the crew of the Marie Celeste. No news is good news and fake news is fun Or would be if the bad news caused less strain. To stop us laughing too long at the Sun ...”

“... perfumes and modern marinades. Taking oil from an olive is like making love to a woman, says one miller after another, as if each of them has thought it up for himself. At Nuñez de Prado in Spain they seem to have the gentlest touch. Breaking with local tradition, they ‘milk’ the branches, picking the fruit off one by one instead of thwacking the trees ...”