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“... tell about it.’ In publishing these stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I stayed in my cabin most of the time,’ Bowles ...”

“... exhausted by working, and miserable that she didn’t have enough time to write. She read instead: James, Woolf (‘I shall go better than she. No children until I have done it’) and Lawrence: ‘Why do I feel I would have known & loved Lawrence – how many women must think this and be wrong!’ They had a lot of morning sex.In June 1958, she had her first ...”

“... the book consists of letters: two to Sarah; several to ‘P – ’, who is Hazlitt’s confidant Peter George Patmore; and three to ‘J.S.K. – ’, or James Sheridan Knowles, recounting the final, farcical agonies of the affair. But the printed Liber Amoris is not the only source. There is a manuscript copy of Part One ...”

“... in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very special piety ties him to the ...”

“... of a message delivered by Nestor. In the dream Agamemnon is told that Troy is about to fall. In Peter Green’s translation:But now listen well: I bring word to you from Zeus,who though far distant greatly cares for and pities you.He bids you arm the long-haired Achaians for battlewith all speed, for now you may take the broad-streeted cityof the ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo ...”

“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In ...”

“... amatory adventures in stuffy aristocratic households. Like and unlike a foreshadowing of Henry James’s The Awkward Age, ‘Lady Susan’ perhaps startles most by the fact that it doesn’t seem, with all its marvellous originality, quite to come off; it leaves a reader cold. And it does so, because the story is cold. Where Henry ...”

“... on. This was just one of the domestic surprises that came in the wake of 11 September. Another was Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise ...”

“... school, funding came from Social Services. Regular guests at their parties included the actor James Robertson Justice, who was one of Britain’s leading film stars in the 1940s and 1950s and reportedly a close friend of the Duke of Edinburgh. Princesses Marina and Alexandra are said to have attended. Among the former Duncroft girls to have come ...”

“... after his childhood that he kept with anything like childhood thoroughness; a number of others peter out like abandoned resolutions or with a characteristic Forsterian admission that he knew too much about a place in advance to be able to experience it. In Italy in 1901, ‘I have got it up so well that nothing comes as a surprise’; on a first Greek ...”

“... terms it was his starry apotheosis.Working the road in the 1930s and 1940s with the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, Sinatra acquired a lot of jazz life knowledge by osmosis. (Jazz inflections peppered his speech for the rest of his life: ‘I’ve known discouragement, despair and all those other cats.’) He learned what not to do: how to hold ...”

“... time in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore second-tier oilfields in Iraq. He ...”