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“... as the youngest son. He reproduced this situation in Lucretia (1846), in which the heir of the St John’s Laughton estate marries the heiress of Vernon Grange. ‘Two sons were born. To the elder was destined his father’s inheritance – to the younger the maternal property. One house is not large enough for two heirs. Nothing could exceed the pride of the ...”

“... authenticity of the voice on the spot, but the overall picture you get is a blur of close-ups. Juliet Gardiner had written very well on social conditions in wartime Britain, and on the changes brought about in the country by the huge scale of the American occupation. I remember American cities, lavishly equipped for the GIs’ comfort and ...”

“... so much that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the throng of books and articles and theses that continue to be devoted to ...”

“... of history among younger people, may be to blame. In his autobiography Grace Before Ploughing, John Masefield – himself an excellent historical writer for children – recalls that he was early made aware ‘of a Civil War feeling, that Hereford and the Welsh had stood for the King, and that across the Severn to the East of us were others who had taken ...”

“... for Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which Alan Rickman plays a ghost who tries to help his widow (Juliet Stevenson) come to terms with his untimely death. One of the tricks he tries is to recite Pablo Neruda’s ‘Dead Woman’ (‘I shall stay alive,/because above all things you wanted me’) – a fact advertised in an essay in the Bloodaxe anthology, the ...”

“... a wide range of cultural influences into his work. Among his operas, A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901) was based on a Swiss story, Fennimore and Gerda (1910) on a Danish novel, and The Magic Fountain (1895) is about Juan Ponce de León’s ‘discovery’ of Florida. Even Brigg Fair, the Times commented, ‘does not sound like an English folksong ...”

“... The first known translation of Madame Bovary was undertaken from a fair copy of the manuscript by Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline, in 1856-57. Quite possibly, she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated ...”

“... gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While negotiations were going on at Mile ...”

“... and Rousseau’s Emile. One of the more involved episodes centres on a performance of Romeo and Juliet in which Romeo, rather than dying after drinking the poison, has a series of hallucinations, one of which is a vision of the temptation of Eve, which materialises on stage out of ‘a thick, meticulously sculpted billow of smoke’. More astonishing even ...”

“... Sir John Gielgud is 75. To hear him talk or watch him on the stage he seems much younger, whereas his recollections of the lions of the Edwardian theatre ought to put him well past his century. It’s an elastic life because baby Gielgud was so quick off the mark, the famous nose soon round the edge of the pram observing the odd behaviour of his Terry uncles and aunts ...”

“... status, briefly elevated as the great modern poet that independent witnesses like Yvor Winters and John Crowe Ransom had always considered him, and in many quarters is now being just as promptly and precipitately returned to the Victorian cobwebs. What has done most damage – and understandably, since it’s the verdict of a friend over many years, with no ...”

“... exemplified in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern ...”

“... number of the 47 novels to print. A new and complete edition of the letters (edited by N. John Hall) is about to take over from Bradford Booth’s handy but imperfect single volume. A new and definitive biography (by Hall again) is in hand. And there has been an astonishing number of monographs and hardbacked collections of essays on Trollope in the ...”

“... in 1875, Ruskin connected her with Verona because of the city’s association with Shakespeare’s Juliet. In ‘Dust of Gold’, one of the late numbers of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin remembers Friar Lawrence rebuking the parents’ grief at Juliet’s death:                             Heaven and ...”

“... on stage when she took all the parts. She had been a celebrity at 19, when she made her debut as Juliet at Covent Garden in 1829; but she was a middle-aged woman in flight from a terrible marriage when she began a second career reading Shakespeare’s plays before enthusiastic audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Dressed in a carefully chosen series of ...”