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“... of pen-portraits, beginning with his corpse-side meditations on the death of his artisan father James (‘the sunk pillar on which mine was to rise’) in 1832 and of Jane 34 years later, taking in her early admirers Edward Irving and Francis Jeffrey, and winding up with more controlled recollections of Wordsworth, Southey, ‘Christopher North’ (John ...”

“... black and white farmhouses, and small manor houses like Kelmscott. The past celebrated by William Morris or C.R. Ashbee was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the great hall and the long gallery. Objects of relative indifference to a philistine public, country houses were seen by a ...”

“... strategic and maritime benefits conferred on the empire by the Caribbean. The radical journalist William Cobbett, a rather unexpected ally of the slaveholders, believed that the planters ‘ought to be scrupulously attended to, as if they were farmers in Cornwall or in Yorkshire’ and were ‘entitled to the same protection in their persons and fortunes, as ...”

“... Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant reflecting telescope, on a mission to map the southern skies and observe the return of Halley’s Comet. Now, the Sun reported, he had trained his ...”

“... for medieval culture. (Readers who prefer modern English can consult the excellent translation by William Granger Ryan, published by Princeton in 1993.) Pious instruction, sensational entertainment, conservative propaganda, erotic titillation, sacred violence – the Golden Legend offered all these and more. Most obviously, it offered a way to hallow ...”

“... the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She was later transferred to entertain his younger daughter, the emotionally, intellectually and physically challenged Princess Anne. This was hardly a plum position: Anne was third in line to the throne with the likelihood that ...”

“... interest is something he calls ‘literary vitalism’: ‘Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell’. As he sees it, these writers traffic in ‘the purifying effect of struggle’, all ‘Eros and Thanatos’ and ‘solitary acts of personal liberation’. Teaching Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, he finds his students ...”

“... started slowly. Before the First World War, smoking had doubtful associations for most Americans. James Buchanan Duke’s American Tobacco Company pioneered the manufacture of desire by surrounding cigarettes with Orientalist fantasy, but the unintended consequence of such advertising was to reinforce the connection in the popular mind between smoking and ...”

“... Ned, an American whose voice whines like a gnat, manipulates the stupid but beautiful bisexual James in The Sweet Dove Died. Inviting his rival, the fastidious Leonora, to view the ‘exceptionally wide double bed covered in mauve velvet’ in his flat, he enjoys telling her that ‘comfort isn’t all I go for.’Spinsters, clerics, homosexuals – and ...”

“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

“... it can speak thoughts and shape emotions we didn’t know we had. For him, as for his chief master William Empson, imaginative writing is a way of thinking and feeling to which you can and should react as to a person, with all the emotions and confusions and desires that being a person encompasses. As Ricks puts it in Keats and Embarrassment, ‘can we praise ...”

“... case of a prejudice shared in varying degrees by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as ...”

“... Queen’s Rebels). While I can’t abide the Orange Order, its central totemic figure – William of Orange – is and always will be a heroic figure for me. When Hazlitt remarks that England was to reject the ‘detestable doctrine’ of the divine right of kings, which ‘first tottered and fell headless to the ground with the martyred ...”

“... The spirit is sometimes called Structuralism, sometimes Deconstruction or Post-Structuralism. James Gribble’s book is a call to action: the teaching of literature, he argues, should be based upon the centrality of literary criticism. Literary criticism is ‘that form of discourse which undertakes the analysis of works of literature so as to do justice ...”

“... He died, in fact, while on a final lecture tour in England, collapsing after a reading in St James Hall in March 1870. Nor is Conrad any less misleading about Dickens’s first trip to America. Having served up some ersatz fare about American Notes (‘in Dickens’s nightmarish America, there is emptiness: panic has driven away even the ...”