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“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit. After her years in the wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS ...”

“... even more, from Lord Burlington and William Kent to the Adam brothers, William Chambers, James Wyatt and John Soane. Palladian and later classically inspired country houses stand as enduring monuments to the Grand Tour as a cultural phenomenon that was brought to an end by the wars of the French Revolution. It is poignant that publication of the Dictionary ...”

“... his short fiction; it is also, in the words of Michaels’s most persuasive critical cheerleader, Wyatt Mason, ‘the story towards which Michaels had, in some sense, been working all along’. It strikes a new tone in his writing – clear and direct, as if a layer of bluff and obfuscation has been removed. ‘In 1960,’ it begins, ‘after two years of ...”

“... and highly expensive sobriety that’s captured in the portrait of an unflinching Thomas Wyatt on the cover of Gunn’s book. The greatest of them came to resemble the noblemen they rivalled, possessing lands and houses, retainers (in a remarkable piece of research, Gunn has reconstructed much of the 1365-strong retinue of Thomas Lovell, one of ...”

“... then I can start again being drearily splendid.’ Ten days later she records that she and Honor Wyatt (then in the process of getting divorced from Glover) ‘decided that the burden and continual strain of being “splendid” was sometimes unbearable – sometimes something snaps’. The majority of Barbara Pym’s novels ostensibly avert their gaze from ...”

“... for translation. The process inevitably entails losses, but might there not be compensatory gains? Wyatt both translates and radically departs from Petrarch’s ‘Una candida cerva sopra l’erba’ in ‘Whoso list to hunt I know where is an hind’. Petrarch’s seasonal freshness, colour and descriptive specificity are wilfully sacrificed, but the harsh ...”

“... knows, earlier in the 19th century the talented Duchess of Rutland, once her Duke and James Wyatt had died, rebuilt Belvoir Castle after a great fire with the aid of her equally talented chaplain, in a romantic Camelot style very popular with film producers. Many a parvenu must have wished for a wife like that, or indeed a chaplain. The Rise of the ...”

“... one of which belonged to Sportsview, the other to Panorama. Ours was in America, with Woodrow Wyatt, who was covering the Eisenhower-Stevenson election campaign. So, on the off-chance that our visas might come through, I booked four seats and cargo space for our cumbersome camera gear on a flight to Warsaw, via Vienna, for Monday 29 ...”

“... German, and five shelves of collections of short stories. The first room contained poetry (from Wyatt to Eliot – more recent poetry was kept at home), Victorian literature and criticism, and what could broadly be described as modernism. Orwell’s works occupied two shelves beneath the CD player. A revolving bookcase on loan from the college library held ...”

“... laughed, agreed, it was over in minutes. But Macmillan could also be morose, telling Woodrow Wyatt that his son Maurice ‘was much nicer than me. I was always a shit. Maurice wouldn’t be one so that’s why he didn’t get on in politics like me.’ The great drama of Macmillan’s premiership – he was the first to have thermonuclear weapons at his ...”

“... often the same people, so were poets and politicians. Five Tudor politicians of stature – More, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Ralegh – wrote enduring literature. In our time MPs and former Cabinet ministers sometimes try their hand at popular fiction, but somehow the results are not quite the same. Alongside the major literary names there were numerous minor ...”

“... rather than culturally. But the literature of the Tudor age, and especially its poets, Surrey, Wyatt, Spenser, Donne, are invoked to provide their own commentary on great and tragic events, like the voices of sympathetic and sorrowing observers in a Monteverdi madrigal, or the ‘songs’ in Sidney’s Arcadia. And Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor ...”

“... in its midst’. The English preferred, in the words of the governor of Virginia, Sir Francis Wyatt, ‘to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thorns in our sides’. The Spanish south, by contrast, was colonised by aristocrats and would-be aristocrats, whose wealth and self-image relied heavily on the existence of a highly stratified native ...”

“... keeps delivering.As well as Epstein and Maxwell it can offer such bit players as John Bryan; Steve Wyatt, ‘a hunky Texan oilman’, and his biological father, Bobby Lipman (who killed a young woman while tripping); Ruth, Lady Fermoy; Major Ron Ferguson’s loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage parlour); the queen mother’s lodged fishbone; James ...”

“... minimal. It’s a bit like trying not to miss the earthy, textured solidity of Chaucer, or Thomas Wyatt, when you read Petrarch: you have to learn not to want that particular localised moonlit wood. It’s just ‘the wood’. In fact Leopardi was writing out of an intense attachment to the landscape around his home in Recanati, in the Marche, 15 miles from ...”