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“... year: but this very arbitrariness could be made to seem providential. The opening line of Rupert Brooke’s War Sonnets proclaimed an Infantry subaltern’s credo: ‘Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour.’ The public school ideal, heightened and purified by the war, forms the passionate core of Vera Brittain’s newly-published diary. Her ...”

“... for the security forces. Would they at last teach the cheeky croppies from Derry a lesson? Had not John Taylor, Northern Ireland’s Home Affairs Minister, declared, after the shooting of Cusack and Beattie: ‘I feel that it may be necessary to shoot even more in the forthcoming months’? Had not the newly-formed extremist Democratic Unionist Party announced ...”

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... Farrant, and later by Oxford’s Boys, an amalgam of children’s companies put together by John Lyly, who was then secretary to the Earl of Oxford. Two elegant Lyly comedies, Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, were premiered there in 1584, but in that same year legal wrangles over the lease led to the closure of the theatre. If Shakespeare and his company ...”

“... was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for ...”

“... was my misfortune never to meet any of the right ones, except Pino and himself.’ Like Rupert Brooke (with his ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’) Lawrence had placed a curious stress on the ‘cleanness’ of the war and the warriors he evoked in The Seven Pillars, but Aldington was not having any of this. There was nothing clean about ‘unwashed ...”

“... is now known mainly on account of his connection with the dreary first husband of Dorothea Brooke in Middle-march. It is no use Gordon Haight’s denying that George Eliot meant to satirise Pattison: John Sparrow has pointed out that in that case it is odd that George Eliot, who was well acquainted with Pattison and ...”

“... as rational, calculable and rule-bound. The polarity operates clearly in an epigram coined by Sir John Davies in 1594: Publius, student at the common law, Oft leaves his books, and for his recreation, To Paris Garden doth himself withdraw, Where he is ravished with such delectation, As down among the bears and dogs he goes; Where, whilst he skipping ...”

“... about Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Painfully, through their unhappy marriages, Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth learn their way into a ‘new form of subjectivity’, and into new lives as legal subjects too – Schor offsets Eliot’s stories of the private life against the language of John Stuart Mill’s ...”

“... Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie ...”

“... the Government wavering, the Tyneham campaigners played their last card. Lord Fenner Brockway took John Gould, a road-sweeper who was already among Tyneham’s most symbolised villagers, to 10 Downing Street. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Gould presented Harold Wilson with a wreath made of ivy picked from the ruins of the cottage in which he had been ...”

“... society that George Tomlinson (a future Bishop of Gibraltar) and II of his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge founded in 1820 – occupies a distinctive niche in British social mythology. Or, rather, it occupies several niches, according to the taste of the mythologiser. In the eyes of many of its members, looking back in later years on the ...”

“... extensive knowledge. When he wants to tell us what a good scholar Housman was, he quotes the late John Carter’s comment on the testimonials supplied by various scholars when Housman was candidate for the Chair of Latin at University College, London. ‘Perhaps only those conversant with the trades-union of Academe,’ wrote Carter, ‘can appreciate to the ...”

“... were several, including partisans operating behind enemy lines. It is thought that one of them was John Cairncross, one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, who had also been supplying Ultra information to the Russians from his post at Bletchley. That James’s information was both copious and refined by British Military Intelligence into an easily assimilable form ...”