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“... bijou library steps might be with ‘the Pope of Mope’.11 October. Sam F. rings to say that Michael Neve has died, and I sit in the front room and think about him. He was a great chronicler, a remembrancer, recording stuff one had said and funny remarks, so that one felt a bigger personality or a more three-dimensional one. He was ...”

“... Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the ...”

“... told that the typescript was read by Frank Kermode, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim and Karl Miller, a formidable jury who, at the very least, seem likely to have ensured that a satisfactory account of the Encounter imbroglio would be given. Faced with such difficulties and such good fortune, Sutherland has coped very dexterously. His narrative voice is ...”

“... swooning away for very picturesqueness. Nine years later he would bury his character Daisy Miller in this graveyard, ‘in an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring-flowers’. By the end of the century he would often find himself standing in the cemetery at the grave of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, who ...”

“... some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and ...”

“... Edison survived to the age of 84 on meals weighing no more than four or five ounces.)Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and others like them, had made science fashionable, popular and hugely exciting. Edison and his schoolfellows began experimenting with chemical reactions. At the age of 12, with the help of a friend, he built a half-mile-long telegraph line ...”

“... Italian soldiers are unlikely to have called Hemingway giovanni Americano, and when Johnny Miller missed his stroke while rowing he was not catching crabs. How Griffin is going to get Hemingway’s extraordinarily eventful last forty years into only two more volumes if he goes on at this rate is a question only time will answer. Jeffrey Meyers, in his ...”

“... point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which Huxley had backed the wrong ...”

“... frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing’. But his reputation has remained tinged with an almost religious aura. Even his daughter recognises why he might have been described as ‘an ascetic divine’, who ‘with his lean ...”

“... the meaningful non-statement is odd but, for the reader, it has a curiously addictive quality. As Michael Wood excellently put it, we repeatedly find ourselves asking ‘why we are smiling when there doesn’t seem to be anything to smile about’.Tóibín is not the first person to advance an interpretation of Mann as a virtuoso of life in the closet, and he ...”

“... reality than the author could bear. ‘It has become a critical commonplace,’ Linda Patterson Miller writes in her foreword to the present volume, ‘that his wounding as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in World War One scarred him psychologically and led him to create emotionally damaged heroes attempting to live in a troubled world through the ...”

“... a tragedy about a character with a completely transparent or apparently Cratylic name, as Arthur Miller did with Willy Loman. Here the ‘wrongness’ of the name for its literary kind is a way of marking the adversarial relationship between Death of a Salesman and tragedy as traditionally practised and conceived. The name insists that Loman’s death is as ...”

“... and Diet Cokes), the vice president’s press secretary (known mainly as the wife of Stephen Miller, the anti-immigrant architect of immigration policy) and Ivanka Trump’s personal assistant all test positive.The headline across the front page of the New York Times is: ‘us unemployment is worst since depression.’ That morning, the president ...”

“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the ...”