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“... is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and the dramatic purpose of ...”

“... the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark Ross, Rae, Pullen, Collinson, M’Clure, Austin, Ommanney, Richardson, Penny, DeHaven, Kane, Forsyth, Bellot, Kennedy, Belcher, Inglefield, M’Clintock – and names of ships, such as ...”

“... his collateral descendant Oliver (also no slouch at creating ruins). Amid much that is familiar, James Clark’s absorbing and formidable study presents much that is refreshingly new, as might be expected after a lifetime of scholarly work on late medieval English monastic life. Clark corrects the common impression ...”

“... Each and every​ place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them ...”

“... its fee. In 1948, almost twenty years after he left Germany and arrived in Britain, he had another go and afterwards described it to his wife, Lola. ‘Tired, washed out, deflated, dizzy (only three whiskies), and not a bit happy. I made several really awful mistakes, turning in the street with brakes on … My only reaction at the moment is intense hatred ...”

“... was an aberration in which personality conspired with circumstances, creating a tangle which Axel Clark, in this admirably hard-headed critical biography, does much to sort out. Brennan was a prodigy of the Australian Fin-de-Siècle who had pretty well given up writing by the beginning of the Twenties, thereby giving himself more time in the day to be drunk ...”

“... always an impatience, a sense of insufficiency, haunting the Aesthetic Movement from within. Henry James coming out of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 (before Ruskin’s ‘pot of paint’ had set the lines of battle): ‘It may be a narrow point of view, but to be interesting it seems to me that a picture should have some relation to life as well as to ...”

“... had been supplanted by Tory government of determination and vibrancy. Why, they ask, can’t we go back to those happy bygone days when so much was accomplished? No junior minister more aptly represented that mood than the patrician Thatcherite Alan Clark. A big landowner, a poor QC and a minor historian, the jolly ...”

“... has accordingly not bulked large in arguments over the American Revolution. Now that Jonathan Clark has discovered America, however, religion becomes the centrepiece of an interpretation which banishes all other explanations as anachronistic or incomplete. Clark is the man who put the Tory back into British history with ...”

“... But it seems that this self-denying ordinance is becoming increasingly hard to sustain: James Sharpe’s Bewitching of Anne Gunter includes the story of Elizabeth Stile, executed in 1579, told, for what is I think the first time in modern scholarly literature, as if she believed herself to be a witch. The modern history of the witch-hunt begins with ...”

“... cadence were now and again interrupted by very broad errors. One at least still lingered for Carol Clark to correct in her version of The Prisoner. When sleeping, Albertine is said to shed ‘the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me’, ‘ses différents caractères d’humanité qui m’avaient déçu’. Even in the most recent revision of ...”

“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... are you going to get them or are you going to do something damn stupid and let them get you? You go cool and thoughtful, like you’re trained to. But you’re disciplined and your men are disciplined: it’s no good you all rushing round like a bunch of trigger-happy hooligans. You know you’re in danger and that you’re going to have to fight your way ...”

“... and Beagle voyage. It was a world of abundance; only the wealthy, with the workhouses about to go up, could write (as his sweetheart Fanny Owen did): ‘what a horrid disgusting thing money is – I hate the name of it – dont you – it is for vulgar souls – not Beetle Hunters.’ We get a glimpse of Cambridge high life: the gluttony and gambling ...”

“... for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills (d. 1995) should be sold now and rebought later; Becketts (d. 1989) look a little iffy (though would-be insider-dealers should keep an eye on that biographer chap in Reading). The only reliable way for a writer to avoid this post-mortem critical ...”