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“... Margot Heinemann as his domestic companion. In addition to these relatively durable relationships, Goldsmith says that Bernal was a ‘great lover’ and had ‘given pleasure to many women’, and that ‘when he travelled abroad his hosts, especially the Russians, usually made some appropriate arrangements.’ At Fingest, any of us who were there together ...”

“... Is​ there an 18th-century writer to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print; The Deserted Village was a schoolroom favourite well into the 20th century; and She Stoops to Conquer is still performed ...”

“... the modernist musical canon. But that’s precisely the reason you’ll find it on UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith’s online ‘clearing house for the avant-garde’ (at www.ubu.com). Slonimsky’s world-premiere recordings of Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse are catalogued on the website under ‘Sound’, but he’s also in the ‘Outsiders’ section, with other ...”

“... Dr Leavis himself. Then came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of this ...”

“... for constitutional and financial benefits, and culminated in the creation of the yeomanry. The Goldsmith Court Minute Book leaves no doubt as to the true nature of the episode. I suggested in my book that in the 1630s the City was more favourable to the Royal plan for rebuilding St Paul’s than to the radical Puritan Feoffees of Impropriation. Ashton ...”

“... It is easy to argue about the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through ...”

“... so on and so on. Despite the transparent craziness of such notions, the head of MI6 himself, Sir Maurice Oldfield, went along for some time with the idea that the Sino-Soviet split was a fake. The terrifying fact was that Angleton, when asked about co-operation with friendly intelligence services, would deny that there was such a thing as a friendly ...”

“... deprecation, during the rational 18th century, on account of its outlandish elements (we find Goldsmith offering to bring ‘Dick Whittington’ into line with the current ‘educational’ policy on children’s fiction by cutting out the cat). ‘Tom Thumb shall now be thrown away,’ decreed an anti-fantasist of the period: however, as Leeson smartly ...”