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“... for example, that Betjeman was friendly with P. Morton Shand and his lovely daughters, Elspeth and Mary, ‘who were to marry, respectively, the politician Geoffrey Howe (now Lord Howe) and the architect James (later Sir James) Stirling’. Sometimes whole sentences seem designed merely to boast of good breeding: the good looks of the young Candida, Hillier ...”

“... predicaments with a cold eye and ‘cool brains’ (in the prescription of the Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut). And the defeat of 1865 merely confirmed their prescience about the instability of people, places and things. The American South, in O’Brien’s telling, learned a lesson in defeat that would not reach Europe for fifty years. O’Brien has a ...”

“... Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; Donne’s Biathanatos and ‘Satire III’; the ‘Hail Mary’; Psalm 143; Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Eliot’s Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism; Swinburne’s ‘A Leave-Taking’; Pater’s The Renaissance. Perhaps any editor might ...”

“... unabashed moral seriousness, to tutor or reform an age. Many, such as Fielding’s cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, would go on laughing at Richardson the anxious arriviste for his ‘low’ pretensions to gentility. His next and greatest novel, Clarissa, featured aristocratic characters and made him vulnerable to readers able to catch his errors of ...”

“... could use the law as ruthlessly as predatory males. Indeed, they could sometimes be the predators. Mary Stenson, an heiress from the minor gentry, seems to have trifled with the affections and the bodies of two men in the 1650s and 1660s, before marrying a third. They sued, but she won. Twenty years later, Mary Cudworth, the ...”

“... as his idol. Lewes actually wrote a biography of Shelley, encouraged by Leigh Hunt, though not by Mary Shelley. It was never published, he himself soon deciding it was a poor piece of work, and it disappeared. I have always regretted this lost book, but Professor Ashton convinces us that Lewes’s low opinion of it was the right one. It was, however, a ...”

“... well as distribution. Williams was able to dismiss the testimony of a psychologist, put forward by Mary Whitehouse, of a causal link between pornography and sexual crime: it ‘cannot … even survive as a plausible hypothesis’. But it no longer requires a moral crusade to endorse the Online Safety Bill now making its way through Parliament, which aims to ...”

“... culture, than more powerful productions.’ Felicia Hemans was huge in America, where Andrews Norton (Charles Eliot Norton’s father) offered her a prestigious job editing a literary periodical in Boston, which she turned down. Despite speaking five languages she never left the British Isles. Nor did she ever stop ...”

“... Poets”!’ he wrote to Emily Hale in February 1933, halfway through his year as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want ...”

“... regarding ‘real life’ has been made by Edith Wharton’s most direct heir (in this matter), Mary McCarthy, Miss McCarthy’s brilliant essay ‘The Fact in Fiction’ – published some twenty years ago, though her argument is to some extent continued and amplified in her recent Ideas and the Novel – revived the earlier writer’s question in a far ...”

“... biography which somewhat delicately halted its narrative in 1903-4, with Berenson and his wife Mary returned from a head-hunting trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of ...”

“... of her shawl caught in the back wheel of a car. This summer, Liveright (revived as a division of Norton) republished My Life in its original form. Even with cuts, the book made a huge impression. Reviewing My Life in 1928 for the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker called Duncan a ‘generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman’: an instance of the pot ...”

“... teaching fiction at Emerson College in Boston; Syracuse, where he went to be close to the poet Mary Karr; Bloomington-Normal for his first secure position at Illinois State; and finally Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where he killed himself in 2008 at the age of 46. He emerged as a writer from a university-based avant-garde tradition, but was ...”

“... page (but discreetly, in a corner, taking second place to the front and centre shot of the Queen Mary 2 arriving in New York harbour), and one inside. But before the Defense Department released its photos, the Seattle Times had published a photograph taken by two Maytag employees loading coffins onto planes in Kuwait. The media discussion that followed from ...”

“... herself to blame. Yes, she had been subject to an estranging and neglectful childhood: her mother, Mary (née Coates), supposedly tried to abort her by swallowing turpentine in the last months of her pregnancy; her grifter father, the feckless Jay B. Plangman, vanished when she was an infant. (When she met him at seventeen, he seems to have shown her a stash ...”