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“... Zeus, Helen and a house called Arden, the book collapses together Shakespearean comedies of love, Christian mythologies and Greek tragedies of desire. But there is a suspicion that the grandiose mythical parallels and godly overlays to the mortal drama are just top dressing on a squalid family romance. It comes as no surprise that Helen – who is married to ...”

“... of the Protestant myth. Evans, a seasoned historical theologian, is in a different corner of the ring. She has an impressive command of the content of Wyclif’s 132 books, and she is in good company: in the fifty years since McFarlane’s volume, the scholarship devoted to Wyclif’s mind, and to Wyclif’s Oxford, has grown exponentially. As for the long ...”

“... complain that I am speaking in a tone that is too frivolous for a divine or too biting for a Christian’ – and here Erasmus ends and Burton begins – ‘not I, but Democritus said it.’ Sterne was himself a divine who had been accused of speaking too lightly, of indulging in extravagant praise of folly, and his Burton-inspired defence is that ...”

“... his appetite for controversy. The novel is tremendously fluent if not precise or subtle – Ring Lardner Jr said that Trumbo’s writing ‘was almost as facile as his speech’. His predilection for a certain kind of freewheeling bombast often led him to take up radical stances he couldn’t maintain. His opposition to war failed to survive Operation ...”

“... attended the MLA meeting in New York, what he called ‘the Big Daddy of conferences ... a three-ring circus of the literary intelligentsia’ has grown to four rings at least. There are now 2100 papers in 800 sessions, plus readings by well-known authors, meetings of over a hundred allied organisations such as the Edith Wharton Society (a Salman Rushdie ...”

“... been two horrifying murders since I’ve been away. I sit talking to Alice and Charlie, the devout Christian parents of one victim. ‘I knew something was coming two days before,’ Alice says, ‘and I prayed to God, just like I am talking to you. I felt so heavy and tired, I just told Him: “Take all this. I give it up to You.” ’ As the anger and grief ...”

“... pencil poised, the poet sports a rust-red silk scarf over a black shirt and wears a large ring mounted with a chunky ruby. The painting is clumsy but it does express how seriously Hill takes himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying ...”

“... but getting rid of them will make things normal and comfortable again. All this has a familiar ring to it, not only a Biblical one. Elitism, so-called, is unpopular in the socialist society, a smear word to be used against artists and dissidents, Jews and intellectuals. (The KGB, like the Militant Tendency, never, of course, constitutes an ...”

“... success. Even relatively minor figures declined to come. Some came but soon left, like Hans Christian Andersen and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, author of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles’. The exception was Franz Liszt, who spent thirty years in Weimar in all. He first appeared in 1841 and was soon offered the post of extraordinary ...”

“... which the object is to hit a small, distant target with accuracy. In rifle shooting, the central ring is around fifty yards away; in archery, it is about one hundred yards to the target – from where the archer stands, it looks no bigger than the head of a drawing pin held at arm’s length. But the distances in golf are greater, and on the vast courses ...”

“... He was born in 1948, the year of the Palestinian catastrophe. He grew up in the predominantly Christian east of Beirut, in the prosperous hilltop neighbourhood of Ashrafiyyeh, also known as Little Mountain – Little Mountain is the title of his second novel, published in 1977, and his first book to be translated into English, in 1989. His grandfather ...”

“... important. Including all one’s foolish desires: a penis that would grow erect at will, a magic ring he could use to make women fall in love with him, good teeth, good skin, money in his pocket. But is romantic passion compatible with freedom? Beyle knew it wasn’t. To fall in love was to be ‘overwhelmed by some superior force’. Nor did it guarantee ...”

“... on), Les Misérables keeps its French title in English because the word has an attractive, exotic ring to the English ear. It is a question of marketing. Les Misérables sounds more romantic than The Wretched, a title that was initially placed alongside it in explanation. If anything, the use of the French title obscures the moral discrimination Hugo is ...”

“... if the objects of their admiration differed. Few of their comments are without some contemporary ring. Escaping from the pruderies of Weimar to Rome, Goethe found it ‘morally salutary to be living in the midst of a sensual people’. In Italy, Byron decided, ‘there is no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without ...”

“... hands. On his pinky – you cannot see it, it lies under the covers – he wears a gold ring, not a wedding ring but a high-school ring, a singular trinket for a fabulously misanthropic miser. His youngest daughter gave it to him when she left school and asked him to wear ...”