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“... have kept all right so far this winter, but won’t brag.’ Three days later, in a note thanking John Middleton Murry for a presentation copy of one of his books, comes a sudden flash of intimacy almost painful in its nakedness: ‘I feel a sad sense of shortcoming at your good opinion of my writings & myself. I fear you do not know what a feeble person I ...”

“... of the picture’s export from Italy was raised. Meanwhile, the attribution to Raphael made by John Shearman, the prominent Raphael scholar who was then at the Courtauld Institute, was widely challenged, sometimes in very strong terms. And then the picture had to be returned to Italy. It must have seemed as if the Museum of Fine Arts had been copped for ...”

“... of the press organs in that difficult period, was supported from time to time by the Government. John Walter II, no longer having that support, switched into opposition in 1820 and supported Queen Caroline against George IV. Whether or not his motives were disinterested, his sales more than doubled. There is nothing like sexual scandal and public passion to ...”

“... of earlier styles is concerned, Thorpe exudes confidence: he’s well up to the standard set by Barnes and Ackroyd, say. (Not that judgment is really possible by non-specialists in the relevant periods: it wasn’t until a particularly unconvincing passage in the modern section – a conversation between three ‘youths’ who are required to mouth ...”

“... not persist in thinking that translation is all about loss – as so many people do, and as Julian Barnes did in these pages in 2010, with his fine phrase suggesting that the best translation can offer us only ‘a new way of necessarily falling short’.* No fidelity at all wouldn’t fall short: the old text would just have vanished. And plural fidelities ...”

“... to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but there are other ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... New York homes of the Lewins, where he is known to have dined with George Cukor, Nazimova, Djuna Barnes and no doubt many others; he chatted with Greta Garbo on the street. He was perhaps most in his element at the Automat, but he also inhabited, however peripherally, Hollywood and Jewish high societies. Most of all, this kind, self-effacing man spent most ...”

“... attended in Dobbs Ferry, about an hour’s drive up the Hudson from New York City. Her father, John Cheever, drove her to the school. ‘Joey!’ Cummings shouted when he spotted Cheever, whom he’d first met in the 1930s (‘Joey’ was Cheever’s boyhood nickname). Cheever remembered that first meeting: Cummings’s ‘last book of poetry had been ...”

“... that he was interested in property: the big house, New Place, that he bought in Stratford; the ‘barnes, stables, Orchardes, gardens, landes, tenementes’ that he acquired in nearby villages; the broad silver-gilt bowl that he left to his daughter Judith. Is it a problem for Maus that Shakespeare hardly ever uses the word ‘property’ in this sense? The ...”

“... of Modernist authorship. Barnabooth was invented on his first trip to London after a visit to the Barnes branch of Boots the Chemist. Poems by a Rich Amateur was the pilot light of French Modernism; it was also a provocation and manifesto, and the young Valery’s camouflaged revenge on a stupid, authoritarian mother who had obliged him to accept legal ...”

“... and the language of convicts, solicitors and medics did find its way into the writing.’ In 1946, John Betjeman said that his ideal second occupation would be ‘station-master on a small country branch line (single track)’. And when writers now are questioned about second jobs, a similar wistfulness descends. Julian ...”

“... they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely!’ As Djuna Barnes reports Joyce to have said, ‘there is not one single serious line in it.’It is probable that the open spaces of Dublin saw an amount of action at a time when people seldom lived alone and lovers had few places to go. (Today’s rental crisis may be ...”

“... Clash of Civilisations, turns Tertullian’s problem on its head. The Christian sophist, as T.D. Barnes called him, posed his question about Jerusalem in Rome’s own language. But Goodman is not really trying to explore Christian origins, although early Christianity contributes inevitably to the story of the contact between Rome and the Jews. What Goodman ...”

“... with anarchism? The Dadaists would be a good guess, but the truly political ones, such as John Heartfield and George Grosz, were communists, and since the early days of Proudhon and Marx anarchists and communists have been more rivals than comrades. The ultra-composed Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille ...”