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“... time, his narrator Braithwaite falls into a witty, hard-boiled, smart-arse tone (like that of his wood-worm who stows away aboard the Ark, or of the private eye Duffy in the crime novels he publishes as ‘Dan Kavanagh’), thus effectively wrecking the parallel, which it is part of Barnes’s scheme to draw, between Braithwaite and the shy and bumbling ...”

“... launched. Murray went on to publish 16 editions by 1879, when his guidebook was succeeded by Charles Dickens Jr’s Dictionary of London, although not before there had been a violent altercation between Murray and his alleged imitators and plagiarisers such as Ward Lock and Baedeker, accused of copying not only his binding and colour in the ‘red ...”

“... charge is directed, fittingly, by descendants of the generals: the Duke of Wellington, HIH Prince Charles Napoléon and HSH Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt. At Hougoumont as it looks now, sitting in open, rolling country, it is difficult to understand why the French didn’t simply overrun it. But the history of battles is often as much about landscape as ...”

“... rediscovered: relations between the shop and the royal household had obviously been close. In the wood-panelled hall of Number Three is a large pair of scales hanging from the ceiling – it was used to measure bags of coffee, tea and sugar sold at the shop. But it was also handy for weighing customers. In part of London society in the 18th century interest ...”

“... of the master nautical chart distributed in Seville to navigators, which may have been a gift to Charles V on his marriage to Isabella of Portugal. Not far from these objects is a pair of polychromed wood busts of an Ecce Homo and Mater Dolorosa by Andrea de Mena, one of few named female sculptors from the 17th ...”

“... Mies van der Rohe had several of those to his name; Arne Jacobsen, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Charles Eames had each designed at least one. Together they seemed to cover all the ways to sit down that were acceptable in a modern room. Postmodern chairs were wild, silly even, but you could half-believe that the museum-worthy architect-designed variety, the ...”

“... seen in the flesh: things in three dimensions, for example (books, pens and pencils whittled from wood), and The Line, a 33-foot-long drawing Steinberg made in 1954 to be enlarged as a mural for a children’s labyrinth in Milan. As you walk along it, the single ruled line that runs from one end of the strip to the other changes its meaning. First it’s ...”

“... glass above the front door lets in some light, but it’s quickly absorbed by the brown-painted wood on the walls. Step into the drawing room, however, and you’re suddenly, implausibly surrounded by decoration and colour. Pale green stalks, leaves, tulip buds and flowers are intertwined on the walls and there’s a narrow frieze just below the ...”

“... Blunt’s treason just as, a hundred years earlier, it dealt privately with the pederasty of Charles Vaughan. In 1859 Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow, suddenly left in order to accept a much lower-profile job as vicar of Doncaster. Not until 1964, when Phyllis Grosskurth published her biography of John Addington Symonds, was it revealed that Vaughan had ...”

“... in its judgments. Pamela is awkward but interesting, Clarissa a brooding masterpiece and Sir Charles Grandison a sententious flop. I’ve no serious quarrel with these views, but the repeated return of the verdicts is rather wearying. The ‘complexity of Clarissa’ has vanished in Grandison; ‘the world of Grandison signals a paralysis of ...”

“... the book, by Louis Geoffroy-Château, is about what didn’t happen after Waterloo. Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie has precisely the opposite politics. It is ‘set … in ancient Rome to emphasise that France’s recent illiberal path had international as well as national repercussions’. Auguste Blanqui’s Éternité par les astres is a ...”

“... Royal remains close in spirit to other difficult to categorise, difficult to explicate, poems: Charles Williams’s The Region of the Summer Stars and David Jones’s The Anathemata. Dun’s expository notes form an independent unit, a parallel text. His theme, a contemporary reworking of the Matter of Britain, is an active project, rather than an ...”

“... more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an ...”

“... Charles Reznikoff​ may be the most elusive poet in American poetry and his book-length Testimony the most elusive long poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban Emily Dickinson: the unknown poet, walking the city streets, writing intense, seemingly matter-of-fact lyrics about things he saw and heard ...”

“... above the baby sleeping on your knee or the song you never heard; ‘The Danger Zone’ that Ray Charles sang throughout the Cuban missile crisis? And does she think the knee she lies on is the bell of a sack but or a crumhorn and the air is turning in a harmony? Another body is hoisted under the sun onto the catafalque of a cargo container amongst other ...”