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“... he reshapes Hegelian-Marxist mappings of the novel (Marx on Balzac). The historical novel, from Scott and Manzoni to Tolstoy, necessarily incorporates epic attributes and purposes. The polyphony, the play of dialogue and rhetoric of conflict essential to drama enter into modern fiction. There is, therefore, a sense in which the prose novel is the logical ...”

“... the golden dolly league in Regency London was the Coutts squad: the widow and three daughters of Thomas Coutts the banker. All were flush with cash from his gigantic fortune (probably well over a million) and all married aristocrats. The widow, 45 at her husband’s death, was perhaps no longer a dolly; but no dolly came more golden. She’d inherited most ...”

“... Welsh songs at the top of his voice, while his friend accompanied him on a penny whistle. Edward Thomas must have remembered his companion’s musical habits a few years later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in ...”

“... adults and turned to children. Another deterrent to continuing with poetry was the script which Thomas Arnold had written for his sons – their ‘destiny’. Matthew, Tom, William: they all, more or less rebelliously, accepted that theirs must be a life of useful toil – they became educationists. In his second published poem, ‘Cromwell’ (‘a prize ...”

“... At the time, the popular appetite for more of both was only partially satisfied by a revival of Thomas Southerne’s play Oroonoko, adapted from Aphra Behn’s novel about love and slavery in Surinam, which had some echoes of the case. A year later came the publication of Love and Madness: A Story Too True. This was a collection of 65 letters, supposedly ...”

“... model, depicting the moment in the battle when the Marquess of Anglesey (who lost his leg) and Sir Thomas Picton (who lost his life) led the celebrated charge against Napoleon’s forces. The official version was restored, and British – or rather Irish and Welsh – heroism given its due. The Iron Duke had some good reasons for seeing off Siborne’s tin and ...”

“... principles were more or less those of Baudelaire’s dandy filtered through Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and naturally with American trimmings – fast, rare, expensive cars being top of the list. According to a female cousin, he had ‘gorgeous taste’. ‘He took things, things seriously,’ writes his son: ‘I recollect things, a gentleman’s ...”

“... has made this book so enticing. It was inevitable, given his background, that he would be drawn to Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist for whom Hollywood was the nemesis he needed. You understand that, no matter the phantom of success and splendour that Fitzgerald endured, his destiny was the swimming pool that awaits Gatsby, or the vanishing of Dick Diver at the ...”

“... same reason. He was also the undeclared reviewer of one of his own novels in the Yorkshire Post. Thomas Gray’s Elegy, the most frequently reprinted poem of 18th-century England, was published anonymously. With becoming modesty, Sense and Sensibility was advertised as ‘By a Lady’, a common enough ascription at the time. None of Austen’s other novels ...”

“... writer Theodor Storm, read Fontane’s earliest work, largely historical ballads in the manner of Scott. Though his poems were popular, Fontane was unable to make a living that way, and turned to journalism, securing a job on a conservative newspaper. ‘Today I sold myself to the reaction for thirty pieces of silver a month and am once more a salaried ...”

“... prime minister Pierre Trudeau. ‘They know Stephen Harper’s approach is failing them.’ Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP), was jubilant: ‘Stephen Harper is the only prime minister in Canadian history who, when asked about the recession during his mandate, gets to say: “Which one?”’ The news, which was largely ...”

“... have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed unsociable, anti-feminist and homophobic, but only ambiguously anti-semitic, and by no means such a dewy-eyed idealiser of the plebs as some have imagined. Both Bowker and Taylor record ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... especially through dense references to the literary canon. That is one reason to be grateful for Thomas Pinney’s splendid new edition, which guides us meticulously through the dense thicket of Saintsbury’s archly bookish allusiveness. How else could one possibly make sense of his passages on German wines? It helps to know who Ausonius was, and that he ...”

“... has suffered repeated jolts to its 16th and 17th-century foundations. In The Political World of Thomas Wentworth – a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and ...”