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“... was a werewolf.’That he was a werewolf seems to have been common knowledge and Thiess himself freely admitted it – in fact, he said, it wasn’t even the first time it had been mentioned in court. Ten years earlier, he had been questioned about his broken nose and had explained to the court that a neighbour had struck him with a broomstick while they ...”

“... over, who thought the mot juste was the first one that came to mind, and who poured himself so freely into his verse, his melodramas, his novels, his family, his women and his politics that he presided over the literary world for sixty years. Hugo’s was a carelessness of expression unthinkable for the slow-writing Flaubert, but Flaubert was happy to pay ...”

“... sofas in the 1950s had broken springs. Once they had buoyed up culture heroes like Rupert Brooke, John Cornford or Guy Burgess. Now, as we trudged across the great Gromboolian plain of the 1950s, they had given up the struggle. Modish undergraduates perched on the arms. Jonathan, new to the place, tried to sit down and slid backwards into the depths. All I ...”

“... of pamph-lets writt-en by the leaders of so-ciety and by ord-inary men and women and they are not freely available at fucking W.H. Smith’s. Since it is 1986, he promptly gets his reader’s card. And the point is made, on the first page of the novel, that the world of Nigel Williams has no time for truckling. Nowadays insolence is what you survive ...”

“... smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite different directions and differ greatly in their ...”

“... Erica Brausen. After Cordell moved to America in 1961 with the man who became her second husband, John McHale, she was largely forgotten in Britain. The sculptor Richard Smith, and McHale himself, suffered similar neglect after leaving the UK.By the time I visited her, Cordell’s memories of the 1950s were patchy. For long stretches we said little. She ...”

“... in southern Poland, Bruno Shulz, than he is to Proust, with whom his French admirers were soon freely comparing him, or than he is to Joyce himself. Shulz came from a lowlier background but had the same kind of humour as Svevo and the same age-in-the-womb tendencies. Cinnamon Shops, titled in America The Street of Crocodiles, is a kind of provincial cousin ...”

“... have – ‘unilateral recognition’, as Elster puts it in Logic and Society, a recognition freely accorded to him by someone who is a chattel, who cannot freely recognise anyone. This state of consciousness is essential to the master, and implicit in the historical forms that his institution takes. There is nothing ...”

“... job as vicar of Doncaster. Not until 1964, when Phyllis Grosskurth published her biography of John Addington Symonds, was it revealed that Vaughan had resigned in order to avoid prosecution for sexual offences with a pupil. As late as 1955, in his essay ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, Noël Annan was writing (probably with a knowing wink at fellow ...”

“... and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched ...”

“... and the need to pore over a small piece of copper all day, meant that the mind could wander freely and would find no check to its uninformed speculations. A contemporary explained: ‘In engraving and its operation the process of thought may be carried on with that of the work, and neither be retarded in its progress, by one who is master of his subject ...”

“... The painter​ Gwen John suffered from jealousy in her relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She was 27 when she started to model for him. He was 63. Rodin slept with a lot of women during his lifetime and the women he slept with also posed for him. John was jealous of Rodin’s other women ...”

“... eyed askance or turned askew. Like Dedalus in the Irish National Library, trying to impress A.E., John Eglinton and Mr Best with his theory of Hamlet, the narrator of Nothing Like the Sun throws in lots of local colour, freely kitsched with quasi-Elizabethan compounds and archaic turns of phrase. Moreover, following ...”

“... 1975. Yet it was not till October 1975, after a meeting with Scott at which the latter talked freely and showed his letters, that he obtained a gun (page 224). Newton is not reported by either book as having given evidence that anyone told him to do this. His evidence as reported by Leigh and Chippindale contains no reference to his receiving instructions ...”

“... produced at the highest level of imaginative intensity, but she manages to make it an asset, as if freely entering and leaving her own novel world. This may indeed be the point which produces her special interest as a novelist, her version of Todorov’s formula of the Jamesian riddle and query: the unsolved query which her art solves is about both her subject ...”