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“... the less respectable details of her life. She was not, in fact, Mrs Leonowens, widow of Major Thomas Leonowens of the Indian Army, but the widow of a mere Mr Owens (given name, Thomas Leon), identified on his death certificate as a ‘Hotel Master’ in the British settlement of Penang. Her father was a poor army ...”

“... Dante in America; T.S. Eliot’s polemical espousing of Dante’s austere sense of the world (more congenial to him than Shakespeare’s) set the Commedia squarely in the modern poetic mind as a text to be studied. There are poetic possibilities in Dante – the high drama of religious judgment, the seductive terza rima, the historical portrayals of ...”

“... from North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, would be debated as matters of life and death more than a thousand years later in Calvin’s Geneva and in the American colonies – even in some modern Nonconformist churches. We may envy a tradition so firmly established, though cruelty and fanaticism seemed inevitable adjuncts of theological certitude. It ...”

“... an elegy, but also a celebration, whose choppy, lengthy, remixed lines showed how some gay men of (more or less) his generation put together a subculture in which they might rebuild lives. Powell learned that he had HIV shortly after he finished writing Tea: his unusual lines could model his friends’ (and his friends’ friends’ friends) bricolage, their ...”

“... with his novel Faggots. Fiction with homosexual content had trickled out through the century, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite ...”

“... the brink of starvation. The stark new multistorey cotton mills of Manchester and Salford employed more and more men, women and children. Textiles, however, were still mostly produced in the traditional way by handloom weavers, working at home or in small workshops in the towns and villages surrounding Manchester, which the ...”

“... He had spent most of his London evenings in the British Museum Library working on Greek, and more intensively, Latin authors, notably Propertius, Juvenal and Ovid, and had produced some learned articles much admired by the few who were qualified to comment. Then, at University College, he began work on an edition of a long, dull and difficult ...”

“... by painting, by an obsession with intellectual and mathematical puzzles, and by becoming even more of a workaholic in fields more to his fancy than the law. Like many with unstable personalities, he was obsessed with finding a balance between extremes, and order and moderation were paramount in his ideas about the ...”

“... lines. In a similar way, Victor Hugo remarked of the post-Napoleonic Bourbons that ‘nothing is more decrepit than at the moment of its restoration.’ The editors of this volume might agree with such sentiments. Their book contains knowledgeable and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the ...”

“... its doctrines, its institutions and, above all, its grandees – has been going on in the US for more than a decade. Take Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, former director of Harvard’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and self-described ‘genocide chick’, who advocated war in Libya and Syria, and argued for new ways to arm-twist US ...”

“... It makes it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day.Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd sourly realistic vignette. The exhibition shows how two different visual cultures produced what lives ...”

“... and exorcistic rituals. Amongst geologists, the villain-in-chief, endlessly execrated, is the Rev. Thomas Burnet. Leading the heroes home are James Hutton and Sir Charles Lyell. What was Burnet’s sin? He was the Judas who supposedly sold out geology to Scripture. In his Sacred Theory of the Earth – which appeared just before Newton’s Principia – Burnet ...”

“... and the acceptance speeches for literary prizes reproduced in Not a Novel – there are many more in the German version – testify to her unlooked for stardom. In 2015 her novel Go Went Gone, which deals with the refugee crisis, was published at the height of the debate in Germany about asylum seekers arriving from Syria. Die Welt’s review appeared on ...”

“... words. But to transmit all those words, a book as large as the Bible required a very large herd. More than five hundred calves died to create the magnificent Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible, which dates from the time of Bede. The Middle English charters allude to a much longer tradition. In an Old English riddle-poem it is the dead animal ...”

“... Reading the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without ...”