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“... and editors. Other leading figures also do both, including, in this country, Christopher Ricks and John Carey. But most critics in good repute don’t seem to want to edit, and wouldn’t be any good if they tried. The provocative element in McGann’s position for them will be his serious belief in the centrality of the role of the editor. He goes back to the ...”

“... Archive on 4. Tonight it’s memories of Mrs Thatcher and a real feast of humbug with Lords Butler, Tebbit and Bell joining in a chorus of self-serving reminiscence of their old mistress with the equally fawning commentary supplied by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of Henry VIII, and one can ...”

“... Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp mid-winter, he at first has to rely on the company of an American academic couple, the Vogelers, who are dispirited by the climate and by ...”

“... figure. A belief in his national importance led to his refusal in 1794 to visit his radical friend John Thelwall – when Thelwall was in Newgate charged with treason – on the grounds that Godwin must not jeopardise his own life, ‘this treasure which does not belong to me but to the public’. It is hard not to be reminded of the passage Jane Austen had ...”

“... contemporaneously. But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the ...”

“... Acts. Although confrontational, there was nothing unprecedented in the Lords’ vote and, as John Bercow, the Speaker of the Commons, has stated, no procedural impropriety. If the clamour were confined to Tory MPs it could easily be dismissed. But a gaggle of retired law lords, who now see themselves as constitutional guardians, also registered concern ...”

“... Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, having edited previously, with some help from Marilyn Butler, all of Godwin’s novels. Philp is undoubtedly the country’s leading Godwinian, having established his authority with his study of Political Justice. He has perhaps become over-committed to the role, although he has also edited an interesting collection ...”

“... of Yeats’s fascination with the young American phenomenon Ezra Pound had cooled enough for Jack Butler Yeats to supply his son with some smouldering paternal wisdom: The poets loved of Ezra Pound are tired of Beauty, since they have met it so often ... I am tired of Beauty my wife, says the poet, but here is that enchanting mistress Ugliness. With her I ...”

“... This singular first person narrates the story of what he takes to be his persecution by his evil butler Fledge, who he thinks has seduced his wife Harriet and deranged his daughter Cleo by killing her fiancé, whose body has been fed to the pigs. Fledge, he insists, is out to succeed him as lord of Crook Manor. But the squire, a gloomy martinet, is more ...”

“... obligation and behaviour for more than two millennia. In Gilead, Robinson’s dying preacher, John Ames, ruminates that we are ‘a little civilisation built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilisations’, and the explicit argument of Reading Genesis is that we fail adequately to understand this patrimony. We are diminished by this, and so is ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... back, Spartacus, Moses and even Robin Hood were played by Americans, while Nero, Pharoah, King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had British accents. To use an American for the hero was only natural, but the hiring of Britons to play a specifically political kind of villain says something particular: namely, that American mythology has quite sharply ...”

“... they have so far been more gallant and vociferous than women in championing her. Lord David Cecil, John Bayley and Philip Larkin have paid her tribute as a superb observer of comic detail, and as the delineator of a world, the Anglican parish, which has a Betjemanesque charm. The article which can perhaps claim to have ‘discovered’ her, by Robert Smith in ...”

“... English novel than Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, with its samurai butler. According to Ian Buruma, there is a Japanese folk-tale motif in which a character finds and makes use of a magic mask only to discover, when the time comes to remove it, that the mask has become stuck to his face. That is the plot of Ishiguro’s ...”

“... members as there had been when Blair won the 1997 election, and nowhere near the million members John Prescott used to boast of as being the party’s achievable goal. People are leaving Labour in droves. To anyone outside the present administration the explanation is simple: New Labour lies, and is craven, and has failed. To senior party figures and ...”