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“... and adaptations galore. Holmes migrates effortlessly between cultures and languages because, like Robinson Crusoe, he’s fiction that’s become myth. ‘Fictions,’ according to Frank Kermode, ‘can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’ The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start. The letters ...”

“... was terrible, and worryingly vague. One of the bankers who had been brought in to rescue Lehman, John Thain of Merrill Lynch, took fright, stepped out of the building, put in a call to the head of the Bank of America, and arranged the sale of his own bank – a bit like popping out to the loo on a blind date and proposing to somebody else. Other American ...”

“... The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent ...”

“... Yeats was prematurely describing her as a woman stricken with age, she had a delirious affair with John Quinn, the American lawyer who was the great, almost indispensable, patron of the Yeats family. Foster, noting that her son, Robert, unlike Sir William, was short, allows himself (hiding the news in a note at the back of his huge book) to report local gossip ...”

“... it made womanhood a lightning rod for attitudes to capitalist modernity. What Adam Smith’s pupil John Millar decried as the ‘habits of avarice’ of ‘polished nations’ generated much moral disquiet in 18th-century Britain. People fretted about ostentation and epicureanism, about the emasculation of manners and morals by ‘unmanly ...”

“... apparently claimed £2000 to install a drainage pipe under his tennis court. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson remarked, ‘the political class has lost control of this story. No one knows where it’s going.’ 11 May. To Westminster. Entire place traumatised. No one talking about anything else. The Speaker gave a right bollocking to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker ...”

“... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence ...”

“... faded. We were left with a still photograph of date palms at sunset. ‘Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson’ was played by violins. It was time for the News. President Saddam Hussein would feature heavily in that, too. This is landscape I have explored before. Romanian Television used to call Nicolae Ceausescu ‘our bright morning star’ and ‘our ...”

“... by Cape in 1980, and then by Penguin and Vintage, except with a new, enthusiastic introduction by John Banville and a useful short bibliography. Bowen is one of those rare writers who is equally good at novels and short stories; in fact, because her novels are short, densely written, formally deliberate, it’s not easy to particularise any difference between ...”

“... darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as ...”

“... our past. Rather than Burns, a better poet to set against Barnes is his English near-contemporary John Clare. No one, thank goodness, sells Clare to us as ‘Northamptonshire dialect-poet’; yet to their Clare: Selected Poems and Prose (1966), Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield appended a glossary of more than two ...”

“... Davies’s book trundles slowly through the birth and marriage of Stobart’s grandfather John and his father’s business beginnings (lime-spreading). We learn how many Saturdays young Edward spent spreading slag and how much cash he liked to keep in his pocket and how much profit Eddie Stobart Ltd made in its first year. There are four pages on the ...”

“... Kerouac, ‘On the Road’ (original typescript, 1951) Jack Kerouac, ‘The Slouch Hat’ (c.1960) John Cohen, ‘Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Corso’ (1959) Wallace Berman, Untitled (Allen Ginsberg, c.1960)PreviousNext These names belong to the original small group of friends who met in New York in the early 1940s. Within ten years Ginsberg had moved ...”

“... Mars-Jones slips in a quick reference to ‘One Arm’, when the narrator, a disabled boy called John Cromer, tells us that he and a schoolfriend ‘wept together over “One Arm” – Jimmy’s tears the more surprising since he knew the story so well’. Craftily, Mars-Jones doesn’t stop to reprise the tale, and the reference is so fleeting that one ...”

“... memorialist or seanchaidh, whose stories were edited into a book by the great Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell. Her words had gone on buzzing and irking in a corner of my brain. Most sources are agreed that the people left Pabbay and the last two islands in the chain, Mingulay and Berneray, quite freely, in a final despair at the harshness of the ...”