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“... suggest that Spark is a very talented, often enchanting ‘diversionist’, as one character calls Nicholas Farringdon in The Girls of Slender Means, is nowadays to risk excoriation from the boosters of contemporary fiction, whose literary horizon seems to be the rim of a book-party cocktail glass. A consensus has closed like an eyelid. For years now Muriel ...”

“... Romanticism, properly seen, was ‘the absence of all Rules but not the absence of art’. Hence Shakespeare, ‘our Father’, was a Romantic. Pushkin certainly came under the sway of Byron, but by the time he was at work on the later chapters of Eugene Onegin, he was having second thoughts. Though by the end of his life he had enough English to read some ...”

“... Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry are sensitive, as Nicholas Murray points out, to the ‘strangeness of his genius’, and avoid tidy ideological categories. We need to attend to the ‘uncanny tremor of implication’ that makes the lucid surfaces of his poems ‘shimmer with a sense of something undefined and ...”

“... them, thus proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher started dropping into the Sun’s offices with her advisers Geoffrey Howe and Nicholas Ridley: she would accept a glass of whisky from Lamb and shamelessly flatter him – ‘What do you think, Larry?’ Lamb responded by concocting two of the most politically effective headlines on record: ‘THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT’ was followed by ...”

“... view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith, nor ...”

“... and has the kind of qualities which it can take over. When does this happen? Not with Mozart, with Shakespeare or with Pushkin, geniuses who can never be denatured, no matter what is done to them in the name of admiration or idolatry. Not even with Tolstoy, in spite of all the ballyhoo of Tolstoyism: his great achievements in art stand inevitably separate from ...”

“... across the expanses of the Fenlands for a century and a half before they collapsed into rubble. Shakespeare, a sensitive barometer of the late Elizabethan Protestant mood, portrayed autumnal emotions in Sonnet 73, where twilight haunts ‘Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’. Had it all been worth it? Roman Catholics knew the answer to ...”

“... drawn to Henry V’s soliloquy before the Battle of Agincourt, yet does not seem to realise that Shakespeare was parading both the vanity and the vainglory of kingship. He seems to think, in his more arrogant moments, that he can walk on water, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana ...”

“... Lucy is really all about his affair with Annette Vallon. Byron? Just remember he loved his sister. Shakespeare? Didn’t you realise he was the Earl of Oxford? The other problem is that even the best examples can’t entirely avoid the naive reduction of literature to evidence or symptom – epiphenomena which are brought about by, and potentially reducible ...”

“... who was on the fringe of my family circle (the best friend of a cousin by marriage), and Nicholas Riasanovsky, a Russian historian. We were to give out money for graduate research projects. I couldn’t call Alexander ‘Onkel Paul’, as I might otherwise have done; ‘Onkel Nick’ was out of the question. And I couldn’t address colleagues as ...”

“... terms. ‘There is no plan by the university to break any trusts,’ Davies and the dean of SAS, Nicholas Mann, stated in 2007. This sounded reassuring, but it emerged in the recent court proceedings that no one in the university bothered to show the trust deed even to their in-house legal adviser until the summer of 2008. Up to that time the university had ...”

“... professional encounters) ‘an elderly Scottish gentleman’ who had brought a manuscript about Shakespeare for him to see because ‘your name is Eliot’ and because the old gentleman’s ‘mother was an Elliot of Galloway’: ‘I heard you lecture to the Shakespeare Association, and I said, that man is a true ...”

“... John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four weeks to rehearse there wasn’t time to tell them more but also because in those days actors were treated with less consideration than they are now, at any rate at the National Theatre. But these early ...”

“... an abject retreat into a feat of everyday British pluck, which the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Harman later called ‘the necessary myth’. Reports of the fighting at Dunkirk, when they eventually began to emerge, often described a situation unrecognisable to the men who were there. A BBC commentary accused German broadcasting of perpetrating a ...”