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“... would be too emotionally extravagant to produce a man like Major. (There are photos of his father, Tom, looking like a cross between George Formby and Norman Wisdom, in the book.) What his parents did bequeath him, however, was a consuming interest in popular entertainment, which this lucid, erudite study distils to excellent effect. An impressive amount of ...”

“... dropped his pen to whack golf balls, flick fishing rods or browse the bookstalls by the Seine (Henry James thought that Lang was too ‘insular and innocent’ to appreciate Paris). But he could only afford to be interested in a topic for the time it took to dash off an article about it. As Oxonian contemporaries racked up professorships, he became an aged ...”

“... I didn’t learn much history at Eton, but one of the first things we were taught was that Henry VI founded Eton, his “College Roiall of oure Lady Eton”, in the year 1440.’ So says Mark Dixon in An Eton Schoolboy’s Album. He may or may not have learned much history, but somewhere along the line Dixon, who left Eton in 1980, has learned how to write in an entertaining and elegant way ...”

“... not been overpraised. There are other forms of artificiality behind the title. It has echoes of Henry Ford’s doomed ‘Fordlandia’, the utopian rubber-tapping city he attempted to establish in the Brazilian jungle to provide for his car factories. It also suggests ‘swampland in Florida’, a phrase synonymous with a real estate scam in which worthless ...”

“... right too, making allowance for a little professional jealousy on young Robert’s part. Even Tom Poole, that sweet young man who lived with his mother and had a steady job in his father’s business, distrusted the Wordsworths. True, Tom had a bit of a gay crush on Sam and wanted to keep him to himself, but he was a ...”

“... On a Saturday morning in November 1966, Tom Phillips picked a book at random from a pile of novels at a house-clearance sale in Peckham Rye. Phillips had never heard of W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document (1892), but he liked the title and the yellow cover and handed over threepence. Back at his kitchen table, Phillips began a process of remaking or ‘treating’ the book: by painting over most of each page with acrylic gouache or ink, he left visible a stream of text which, in dialogue with the images he added, told a new story ...”

“... Fox examine the literature and politics of early Tudor England, especially of the reign of Henry VIII. Mayer’s concern is the literature of political theory. His study examines the ideas of Thomas Starkey, the friend of Cardinal Pole and adviser of Thomas Cromwell, and centres on the programme of reform announced in Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole ...”

“... another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on London. Well, not all: Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens ...”

“... aged 48, went off to America for three and a half years. She had in tow her favourite son Henry, two small daughters, a couple of servants, and a young French artist who was devoted to her, Auguste Hervieu. Mr Trollope was not in attendance. Nor was 12-year-old Anthony. Mrs Trollope’s first destination in America was an Owenite community – Nashoba ...”

“... Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist ...”

“... author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s Eneados when he translated Books Two and Four of Virgil’s epic into English. Surrey rejected Douglas’s use of rhyming couplets and drew on Italian verso sciolto to create the earliest form of blank ...”

“... vaguer fatamorgana figures of your own scarce conscious hopes and desires’. The protagonist in Henry James’s story ‘The Velvet Glove’ feels ‘held down as by a hand mailed in silver’ while listening to a Wagnerian tenor. Hours of suffocation and reverie in the dark created a sense of initiation in a Wagnerian cult.‘Wagnerism’, Alex Ross ...”

“... easygoing. ‘It is a kind of humiliation in a great city not to know where you are going,’ Henry James observed, and this was more than usually the case when the great city was dense with fog, as this one was in the winter months. To a friend considering the move, Daubigny counselled: ‘bring some food … I have to stop writing my letter to you to ...”

“... we would label them) were ‘feiries or Nimphes’ and perhaps others thought so too. In Henry V Mistress Quickly of the Boar’s Head Tavern, lamenting the death of Falstaff, cries that the old sinner can’t be in Hell: ‘He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom!’ She meant ‘Abraham’s bosom’. Or did she? Avalon may ...”

“... Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the building of Peterborough, 184 from the Norman Conquest, 79 from the martyrdom of Becket and 34 from the ...”