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“... debt, friendship, family and inheritance. Starting from the breakdown of medieval landholding in Richard II and Henry IV, Maus ends, after two fine chapters on The Merchant of Venice, with an account of the ‘vagabond kings’ of Henry VI Part II and King Lear. The transition from feudalism to capitalism, from Richard II ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s Life of Joyce, generally regarded as the best literary biography of our time, was the work of his middle years. The last third of his own life was largely given to this biography of Wilde, which was in some ways a very different sort of undertaking. There were surviving acquaintances of Joyce, but nobody who knew Wilde is available for questioning; the material, though copious, must be sought in libraries ...”

“... jumps were new. She’d always made her mind ours too. When we were teaching my little brother, Richard, to talk, to say ‘ta’ for a proffered rusk, my mother would stop me and my other brother, George, from speaking. We all knew what he was supposed to say, but if Richard was ever going to learn, we had to stay ...”

“... walls. The balance of forces is just as likely to shift in the other direction. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers looked to contemporary sculpture for the ethos of structural transparency they applied to the exterior of the Pompidou Centre. Some artists in the 1970s, such as Michael Asher or Iain and Ingrid Baxter, had already begun stripping back the spaces ...”

“... as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The emotional temperature of the Poets’ Theatre in the early days,’ Lurie writes, ‘was high, for most of the younger writers and their friends were ...”

“... women had been housing their own daughters. Drunkenness and riot, on the one hand, and the weight of ecclesiastical discipline, on the other, could arouse formidable resentments. It should, by now, be no matter for surprise that under James, the mechanism of supposedly ‘Puritan’ discipline was frequently carried out through the official machinery ...”

“... generally: so that it was natural for Haig to suppose that he would be the one to take the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. The trouble was that the Reagan concept of the Presidency involved the total management of his time, and of access to him, by a small group of trusted advisers, whose notion of Presidential priority for domestic affairs ...”

“... tackle aspects of British history which would be spurned by British publishers. Without a doubt, Richard Altick chose the best decade of Punch to study, for in many a later period momentous events went unnoticed in its pages and a social conscience was not easy to detect in the weekly output of ‘subsistence journalism’ (Altick’s phrase). By ...”

“... prosecutions and memoirs. His book is not easy reading. Mr Hersh’s prose creaks under the weight of the information he has collected. Here is a typical sentence: ‘The revived interest in the White House wiretaps also prompted William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the ...”

“... by a series of attacks in excess of what our numbers justified, to draw down on ourselves the full weight of the German reserves, so that the American Army could break out to the south. Within a few days we had two Panzer divisions facing us. Our soldiers went into battle, freshly shaved, and they fought with amazing courage: they fought also with real ...”

“... in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building ...”

“... table and his face stuck forward. I got him on the point of the chin, and put every ounce of weight I possessed behind the blow. He crumpled up in a heap and rolled over, upsetting a lamp and knocking a big china jar in two. His head, I remember, lay under the escritoire from which he had taken my passport. Bulldog Drummond v. Count Zadowa in Sapper’s ...”

“... Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des ...”

“... comes to find it difficult to write about Charles without moderation. Instead of thinking, like Dr Richard Cust, that revision has tended to throw out the baby with the bathwater, he thinks that there are large quantities of Whig bathwater still to be drained. Many of Dr Sharpe’s arguments will be engaged by historians for some time to come. He does not ...”

“... as she had had in the past with other men of letters – with Hugh Stuart Boyd on prosody, with Richard Hengist Horne on contemporary literature, with Benjamin Robert Haydon on the artist’s vocation. Browning in this first letter told her that he loved her poetry with its ‘fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new ...”