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“... years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly. He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of ...”

“... and the juxtaposition of Goethe with Hitler – these are the two narrative axes along which Michael Kater tells the story of Weimar. It was the capital of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, a small duchy in the fragmented landscape of the Holy Roman Empire. Cranach lived there briefly, and Bach served even more briefly as court musician, but Weimar was otherwise ...”

“... his novels, and there was another in 1970, when the same edition was republished with prefaces by Michael Holroyd. Gerhardie himself prefixed to the reissue of his first book, Futility, an important essay called ‘My Literary Credo’, which is unfortunately omitted from the new Penguin Modern Classics reprint. (Futility is the only novel in ...”

“... their history when they cherish the Promethean illusion that they are making it’). Anticipating Alexander Zinoviev, he observed that in the Soviet Union ‘le style de la déstalinisation est resté stalinien.’ Was it just for lack of inclination that he never worked out the implications of these and similar insights? It seems more likely that he lacked ...”

“... his bowels were the subjects of countless agonised (and, for the robust William, trying) letters. Michael Anesko’s archivally heroic and at times scandalmongering book traces the way the legendary Master took hold of the public imagination while stifling the real James. Monopolising the Master opens with James’s own efforts to determine his posthumous ...”

“... of Late Writing (2007) and a Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays edited by Catherine Alexander (2009). If there is something intriguingly late aesthetically about these plays, there is also something emphatically last biographically. Whereas Marston and Lyly just stopped writing plays in order to do something else, Shakespeare’s last plays seem ...”

“... Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth. In his lifetime Haydon was well-known and not without admirers but he was dogged increasingly ...”

“... Society and to the British Association for the Advancement of Science – is not a substitute. Alexander Robertus Todd, Baron Trumpington, was the son of a responsible white-collar employee of a railway company who later became managing director of a substantial department store in Glasgow. Todd describes him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went ...”

“... King Alexander ​ of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille on 9 October 1934, alongside Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister. When the news reached Dubrovnik, the bells rang ‘all morning long’ according to a ten-year-old American girl staying in the city. ‘Everybody spoke in an undertone except the roosters and my brother ...”

“... now?’The undertakers zipped him into a mauve body bag and took him away. A few days later, Alexander, my older brother, went to the funeral home – all these homes, this last being the least homely – to choose a coffin. He reported that Daddy had been installed in a garage which, it had been stressed, was modified to mortuary standards. We bundled ...”

“... also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great London rogues of the 1960s. After profiting as one of Rachman’s rent-collectors in the 1950s, he became a West London drugs baron and then, under his new name, head of the ...”

“... had turned to subversive means to force a Russian capitulation. A variety of agents, principally Alexander Helphand, was used to support strike actions and revolutionary movements. The Germans siphoned funds to the Bolsheviks, determined to assist them to power and maintain them until a negotiated peace could be concluded. Though the Bolsheviks became ...”

“... think-tanks. The one ‘proof’ she offers for the Kremlin’s strategy is an interview by Michael Ledeen, editor of the Washington Quarterly Review (of the Georgetown Institute) with General Jan Sejna of Czechoslovakia, who defected to the United States in 1968. The General said nothing publicly on the subject of terrorism at the time of his ...”

“... titans like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, but to contemporary Black poets: Elizabeth Alexander and Terrance Hayes; Harryette Mullen, Reginald Dwayne Betts and Evie Shockley. (He is one of the few young poets who has learned from Hayes without copying him.) But if Charleston represents a new generation of Black writers, he faces similar problems ...”

“... the Middle East, but to no avail). In his absence, working with Tory Blairites like Cameron and Michael Gove seemed a safer bet than with a Labour Party in which the Blairites like Adonis and Mandelson were on the way out, and Miliband Minor and Balls were taking over. During the negotiations, Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, Danny ...”