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“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... de Menil, a major patron and heir to the Schlumberger fortune (made from drill bits for oil wells). Along with a third collaborator, a young art historian called Helen Winkler, Friedrich and de Menil saw that this new work had opened a structural gap in the art world – neither private nor public, its scale was beyond the means of individual collectors ...”

“... the ‘gunpowder plot’ and literary impostor (a category not yet extinct). In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist ...”

“... Allowed to read this work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise ...”

“... pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even John Sparrow, all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for ...”

“... brother to declare his allegiance to the attackers, not the Mastermans or his own wife. When H.G. Wells wrote to the New Witness to protest against the vendetta, Cecil replied: ‘I think it very probable that my brother and I should disagree to a considerable extent … on Masterman’s character and motives.’ But G.K. could not defend Masterman in public ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... his most recent novel, A Man of Parts (2011), a fictional treatment of the life and loves of H.G. Wells. He has also, not coincidentally, long been a keen Jamesian, devoting an acute chapter to The Ambassadors in Language of Fiction, and later attempting a fictionalising of James’s life in his novel Author, Author (2004). Whatever else we might expect of ...”

“... thorough on race equality, poverty and war, and the selection provides a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism ...”

“... in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With all these perils, real or imaginary, and with H.G. Wells raising the spectre of Martians invading England in The War of Worlds, who needed a Yellow Peril? In the vulgar view China was a degenerate nation which exported laundrymen to do the world’s dirty washing. If it posed any real threat it was as a source of ...”

“... exemplified in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern ...”

“... of Thomas Mann’s coolness! Toomey’s real-life colleagues in the arts get a bad press. H.G. Wells is ‘a satyromaniac’, Ford Madox Ford has bad breath and a dirty mind, Norman Douglas is ‘filthy’ and ‘boy shagging’, T.S. Eliot is wrong about the Tarot pack and also (in which case, among many others) about Seneca’s act-division (‘there was ...”

“... the photographs and, above all, in the index, which, for instance, suggests discreetly that both John McCain and Barack Obama indulged in adulterous liaisons with Lupe Vélez, the most fiery of Johnny Weissmuller’s five wives. The conceit is that the index was compiled before the lawyers looked at the manuscript, and remains unrevised after their ...”

“... to prevent its detritus of beer cans, used condoms and dead snakes from invading his pure but dry wells. His hastily thrown up earthworks break, killing the Japanese photographer. Her role is taken over by Sanger, who now follows Mallory everywhere with his video camera, making a secret record of events for Japanese television. Mallory is also followed by the ...”

“... eyes. ‘They were the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen in my whole life. They were like wells; you fell into them,’ the 26-year-old Ingrid Bergman said, who had had a success in a San Francisco production of Anna Christie but wouldn’t let O’Neill lure her away from her film ambitions. At O’Neill’s melancholy core was a trifecta of turmoil ...”