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“... were concocted in a single afternoon and evening by two young Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, as part of a plot to expose the obscurantism and meaninglessness of what passed for poetry under the aegis of Modernism. The Malley oeuvre was composed, they were later to reveal, with the aid of a chance collection of books which happened to be ...”

“... discreetly overlooked. Asquith, Lloyd George’s arch-rival and then boss, pouring out epistolary love and war secrets in equal measure to the young Venetia Stanley in 1915, certainly understood this, and so did Stevenson. ‘So long as a man, or a woman, kept the conventions outwardly, the public would excuse or ignore his private behaviour,’ she wrote in ...”

“... but, alas, remained only good friends’ – to Anna Ford (‘I had the feeling that her first love was men and work came second’), and ‘my friend and discovery Selina – gorgeous, delicious Selina Scott’. The old boy seems always to have been unduly fascinated by sexual speculation. He finds it worthwhile to tell us that Jim Prior told him that one ...”

“... of clever persecuted women suffering from horrible Victorian husbands. Meredith’s poem Modern Love, for all its shrewd bravura, she presented as a typical piece of masculine self-extenuation.   In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be: passion spins the plot. We are betrayed by what is false within. The interesting thing about this famous climax in ...”

“... them and only did so to please her publisher, Grant Richards, with whom, at the time, she was in love. The echoes of Wilde have gone, to be replaced by a celebration of frivolity and inconsequence even more extreme than his, which nonetheless seems to be more deeply rooted in reality. This is the tone of the second version of The Triflers, which was trimmed ...”

“... the ‘dithering’ of Edward Thomas’s early life, treats him not only with respect but with love. Thomas saw himself with bitter clarity. ‘I suppose one does get help to some extent by being helpless, but when one doesn’t – it’s as if one had no pride at all.’ In October 1907 he wrote: ‘I went out and thought what effects my suicide would ...”

“... There had been a number of experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s – among them Harold Nicolson’s delightful vignettes Some People, Lytton Strachey’s psychological melodrama Elizabeth and Essex and A.J.A. Symons’s detective mystery. The Quest for Corvo – all designed to find more imaginative and adventurous ways of writing ...”

“... paint his hero warts and all and admits that he made tactical mistakes – but it is a labour of love, indeed rather too laborious. Together with the notes and index, the book runs to over a thousand pages. It has relatively little to say about Hugh Gaitskell’s private life, but it runs through every detail of his political career, from his adopting the ...”

“... in early and brief adulthood, during which time she seemed to be starving for her father’s love, which in a paternal fashion he gave in abundance, as he always had. The preceding six hundred-odd pages are Simenon’s, telling of his first marriage to Tigy, mother of his son Marc, of houses, trips, holidays, of sexual encounters everywhere, of family ...”

“... old age pensioner, or a half-Jew, or a young novelist, or a Negro, or an Anglican archbishop, or Harold Evans, or even the editor of an Arts Council-backed literary magazine, I suppose I would find some sections of this often amusing book offensive. Actually, more than offensive. I think I would want to do something pretty unpleasant to A. Waugh. But ...”

“... sadness lightly, unafraid of the obvious. ‘We may never ever meet again/On the bumpy road to love’; ‘Oh it’s a long long while/From May to December ... ’ Louis Untermeyer, in an enthusiastic letter written in 1926, when The Wild Party was just a naughty manuscript frightening publishers with its sex and violence, to say nothing of its bad ...”

“... of death was just a part of daily business. At his height (or heights), the building-scaling Harold Lloyd dropped to his non-death every other minute in his movies; Buster Keaton jumped over danger, or stood deadpanning the camera while death squeezed past him. Charlie Chaplin, a little man too big for the real world, smiled at every manner of ...”

“... could think of was that the ship had fallen out of the sky.’ When Billy Bathgate feels complete love, he speaks in the lockjaw idiom of the gangster he is growing to be: ‘Mrs Preston. I’m so nuts about you I can’t see straight.’ Even Doctorow’s most tortured character, the narrator of The Book of Daniel, shares, at his sister’s burial, the ...”

“... of torture to her: making promises it couldn’t keep; showing caring messages covered in love hearts that instantly disappeared, never to be found again; lighting up, at all times of day and night, with graphics and noises only her grandchildren could decipher. Every day was a digital Golgotha. She felt scourged by technological advances and ...”

“... you are. Anglophilia showed itself in the magazine’s politics (Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross describes him praying for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the English can do a certain kind of novel ...”