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“... Firesides contest with the inscription ‘Yea, I have a goodly heritage.’ Unexpectedly, however, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for promoting evolutionary theory in the 1920s, turns out to have been less of a villain than he is usually painted. Scopes may have famously defended evolution, but he was also a keen advocate of ...”

“... dramaturg of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, someone who could claim, like Oscar Wilde, a symbolic relation to his time. The husband whose agonising death from emphysema she watched in California in 1980 (this is the book to give a smoker you love for Christmas) was a lost, wasted man whose misery and sense of exile stare hauntingly out of ...”

“... to the crowd at a John Lewis sale, and similar remarks were made about the Iraq War protests. William Morris, a leading figure in the SDF, was issued with a summons for obstruction in July 1886, six years after his firm had been commissioned to decorate the throne room at St James’s Palace. In a demonstration on the afternoon of 1 March ...”

“... and is no more wounding or incisive in his prose than he is in his cartoons. The absurd figure of William Deedes, for example, is represented thus on page 47: I have watched with a strange sort of gloom as the paper has wallowed and yawed and eventually driven herself on the rocks while Bill has grinned and joked at his desk. And thus on page 79: I got a ...”

“... nominally under Sir Gilbert, but more delicate and more respectful of post-medieval fabric. William Morris’s firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings ...”

“... points of the novel (others were Warhol and Werner Herzog and Kierkegaard and Otto Rank and Oscar Wilde) was the first season of The Hills, an American structured reality show that began on MTV when Heti was 28: ‘I was like, what if we cast ourselves as those girls have been cast?’ The Hills followed blonde best friends trying to make it in LA; How Should ...”

“... ought to be extended. Add to it Bomberg and Epstein in Whitechapel before the Great War (with William Roberts and others as possible recruits), snarling at Wyndham Lewis’s safe Soho Bohème: they are as close as the capital ever came, I think, to a genuine homegrown (meaning homeless and hybrid) modern art. When Bomberg went to Paris with Epstein in ...”

“... own intentions. Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers Poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest If everyone says Tom did it when the man who did it was Will, the result is what one calls an error, and Will is done out of his due. If while everyone says Tom did it you see Will and hail him as Tom, error cancels error ...”

“... about the progress of the script, which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear Pepys. The persistent excellence of the ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... woman, Florence Barger, as confidante. All this is fair enough; Forster, when he agreed first that William Plomer and then P.N. Furbank should write his biography, did not ask that matters of this kind should escape discussion. He lived the greater part of his life under a hated law that banned and might brutally punish his kind of sexuality; it long blighted ...”

“... revenge as Kipling’s ‘Dayspring Mishandled’. Not half as curious, though, as the story of William Morton Fullerton (1865-1952) himself, as pieced together by his last female pursuer. This handsome, dark, blue-eyed, dapper, short American (Henry James gives him much longer legs as Merton Densher, as well as turning him into an Englishman), owner of a ...”

“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... In Cakes and Ale (1930), William Somerset Maugham has Willie Ashenden – his narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety ...”