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“... weird genealogies are disclosed. ‘Angus Wilson, the novelist, who bore a striking resemblance to Margaret Rutherford, the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the ...”

“... work of an English poetess’. Does she deserve a permanent place alongside Wordsworth and Byron? Scott regretted that he found in her ‘too many flowers and too little fruit’, and her modern critics divide into those picking the flowers and those enjoying the fruit. For the former, Hemans is no more than a writer of light verse for a middlebrow ...”

“... of oppression, are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old Story (1822), neatly describing the emotional dynamic by which narratives about Mary Queen of Scots, such as this historical romance itself, could be used to serve the ...”

“... genius.’ Amid the hyperbole it’s refreshing to hear that one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had ...”

“... front of his other loutish house guests. In the film, however (co-written, as it happens, by Allan Scott, who was also one of the writers on Don’t Look Now) this episode is infinitely more disturbing. The squire, nastily played by Kenneth Cranham, turns out to have a penchant not for gentle ribbing but for full-blown black magic rituals. Parson Adams is ...”

“... led to AA’s cult of heroic abstention) celebrated in the work of such contemporaries as Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Raphael sees Wilson – the moving hand behind the ‘Big Book’ (which came out in 1939) – as primarily a writer: an illuminating approach. He also touches on the co-founder’s ‘character defects’ (as AA likes to ...”

“... accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be a nice ...”

“... of great causes. Among them was the Africa Bureau, led with arctic integrity by the Rev. Michael Scott, with Mary Benson – just as dedicated but warm and welcoming – by his side. Close by was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, run by Tommy Fox Pitt. A dignified, slightly military gentleman, Tommy had been a district officer on the Copperbelt in ...”

“... sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar family in ...”

“... Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically everybody, or at least practically everybody who either liked to talk or could bear, as Carlyle grew into stentorian middle age, silently to ...”

“... Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and weed-choked concrete landscapes that appear again and again in JGB’s imagined futures, the collapsing buildings and insanely ...”

“... peoples in various parts of the world, and how they sort plants and animals. He was a pupil of Margaret Mead’s. So he is an anthropologist in a standard sense of the word. But there is an older meaning in which anthropology is humanology. It starts with the firm conviction that there are general, complex and important truths about all of us and our place ...”

“... of O’Connor’s women seem to have forgiven and indeed to have continued to love him. Even Maria Scott, who never saw him again after he left her and their children because she thought ‘he’d say something so awful, so destructive,’ missed him. ‘Philip spoilt me for other men,’ she told Barrow. Something of that state of mind was harshly illuminated ...”

“... subtleties. She can look both dim and cunning, dreamy and on the make. Lubitsch’s biographer, Scott Eyman, wrote: ‘If it’s possible for an actress to believably play a character who sleeps her way to the top and still remains innocent, Negri manages to pull it off.’ Yet for all the compassion the audience feels for her, the film is about du Barry ...”

“... goes to parties and readings, comes across a copy shop and talks to the owner about Jewishness and Margaret Mead, drinks Campari and soda and dodges a one-night stand with a married man. As Sheila sinks into self-pity and boredom, so does her novel. (This must have been the point at which some critics threw the book across the room, if they hadn’t ...”