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“... husband’s poems. In such cases writing does in a sense become a ‘genuinely social activity’. John Clare’s dealings with his publisher Taylor provide a variation on this theme. Clare’s peculiar circumstances resulted in revisions that were necessarily ‘social’, but modern editors have a persistent tendency to ...”

“... of practically every political figure of the 20th century, generously supplemented by A.J.P. Taylor’s accumulated review copies. From time to time there would emerge from his tiny office in the thin end of the wedge-shaped building, behind the Sickert portrait of Beaverbrook and the cases of Lloyd George memorabilia, the high priest Alan ...”

“... Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John Escoffery after their unlawful deportation from Jamaica, was identified as the son of an East India Company chairman. The planters of Mauritius, which Britain had seized from France in 1810, were also damned as agents of subversion.When Macaulay & Babington ...”

“... it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... this technique into his most significant creation, the Daily Mail. In 2012, the journalist John Rentoul produced a satirical essay on the art of the newspaper headline called Questions to Which the Answer Is ‘No!’ It was a homage to Harmsworth, the Mail and their many imitators. Harmsworth had a lifelong thirst for curious facts. On a world tour ...”

“... it ‘a terrible thing to be a woman’, on a visit to London in 1914 found herself in front of John Opie’s portrait of Wollstonecraft: ‘I wanted so desperately to know how other women had saved their souls alive. And the woman in the little frame arrested me, this woman with the auburn hair, and the sad, steady, light-brown eyes, and the gallant poise ...”

“... a seminary, first for Catholics and then for Anglicans. Although the fellowship included John Foxe, whose Actes and Monuments (1563) was, for several centuries, the bestselling English book after the Bible, there were few scholars of note. But then the purpose of Oxbridge colleges in the 16th and 17th centuries ‘was to impart knowledge, not to ...”

“... Stretch him out longer.’ Tough? It sounds like an absurd American misprint: Lear played by John Wayne. We have been brought up to read ‘rough’. But there it is in the Wells and Taylor Oxford Shakespeare. Can it be right? In the OED I find the first date for tough = ‘hard’ as 1619. Well, I can see that twenty ...”

“... College, Oxford, the fact that my vote at college meetings counted the same as that of A.J.P. Taylor seemed to me, as it still does, a glorious democratic quirk of the Oxford collegiate system. I was just 26 and the youngest fellow; he was probably the most famous historian in the world. I was not long to think of him by his initials, for Alan was the ...”

“... being in the right place, as in Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, and it moves rather close to John Wain’s posthumous novel, in his Bildungsroman series about a young man growing up in Oxford – a trifle ironical in view of Amis’s strongly-expressed disdain for Wain’s mode and temper of writing. Both novels join in a mood of mellow ...”

“... just how far, in the post-Drabble-Byatt novel, the process has gone. Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Taylor ignored, in their individual ways, all idea of being ‘women novelists’, as Anita Brookner does today. However ‘feminine’ their subject-matter, they don’t approach it determinedly as ‘women’. And it is ironic that Charlotte Brontë and George ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...”

“... for the godly in England. In 1629 he became active in the Massachusetts Bay Company headed by John Winthrop, a Suffolk man. A year later Pynchon and his family boarded the Ambrose, one of Winthrop’s fleet of four ships that sailed for the New World, where there was known to be land for the taking. Pynchon settled seven miles south of Boston, near ...”

“... she didn’t. For the earliest verified usage, we have to wait for the scholar-critic William Taylor in 1797, and even he had his doubts. He disliked ‘self-biography’, coined the previous year by Isaac D’Israeli, because ‘it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed ...”