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“... in Spender’s autobiography, ‘Harry Watson’ by Worsley and ‘a secretary’ by Hugh Thomas in his history of the Spanish Civil War). The relationship went sour, Spender married, and Tony-Jimmy-Harry, fired by the doctrines he had picked up from his intellectual friends, enlisted in the International Brigade. In Spain, he was traumatised by ...”

“... country for the inevitable war. During this time he was again drinking too much, often with Dylan Thomas, and occasionally more grandly with Eliot and John Hayward. He claimed that in these Marchmont years he was enjoying himself very much, but he was not idling. He was quite heavily involved with Mass Observation, and so with Charles Madge and Kathleen ...”

“... I was reminded of her a decade or so later, when I watched The Shining while convalescing from a savage bout of food poisoning, holed up in a small German-run hotel in the foothills of Bolivia’s Cordillera Real – but that’s another story. There is a wearisome machismo inherent in much of the iconography of typewriting. In The Iron Whim: A Fragmented ...”

“... political or religious authority, were free to invent alternative forms of expression.As Mike Savage emphasises in The Return of Inequality, the ‘modern’ also manifested itself as a distinctive relationship to time and space, felt most acutely when wandering the streets of the great European and American cities. Modern society existed in a condition ...”

“... papers in the Bodleian is a letter from Sharp, dated ‘Good Friday’ (probably 1929 or 1930), savage with wit: Those two sketches . . . both seemed dreadful to me – the most vicious of all forms of child worship enshrined in slovenly language of the most emetic sentimentality . . . followed by a lot of painstaking but washy verse masquerading as poetry ...”

“... A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the point of pretending that his poem is a good one if it is not? But can the same honesty be expected of other people? Are not so many of life’s activities a means of escaping from self-knowledge? How many people could persevere, if they knew in their hearts they were quite unimportant ...”

“... language were ruder and less polished than those of their Continental counterparts. The translator Thomas Hoby called for writers to translate important works in order to enrich their own language, so that ‘we alone of the worlde maye not bee styll counted barbarous in our tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in our maners’. For Hoby and his ...”

“... summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short View of the State of ...”

“... of Virginia as a symbol of conquest and dominion over the American wilderness and its supposedly savage ways.The Pocahontas story has been avidly fictionalised in novels and films, mostly as a bogus love story between Matoaka and the explorer Captain John Smith. It’s a versatile tale, delivering romance and adventure, as well as a Southern creation myth ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards ...”

“... and cultural assumptions. In the 19th century, anthropology was or became the study of ‘savage’ – that is, ‘darkskinned’ – peoples in remote and exotic corners of the earth. By contrast, sociology was the study of ‘civilised’ peoples – that is, Europeans: which explains, says Stocking, why sometime colonial subjects prefer sociology ...”

“... adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear away the flak and innuendo. Some years ago, King discredited ...”

“... Published two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate ...”

“... for instance, Natty rescues one of the twice-captured maidens from the grip of an especially savage, cunning and evil Indian by dressing up in a conjurer’s bear costume and imitating the animal’s loping waddle so skilfully that he goes undetected, while Chingachgook fools the warriors of an enemy tribe by donning a furry mask and pretending to be a ...”

“... wrote a double biography of the literary Brothers Mann, giving equal billing to the celebrated Thomas and the neglected Heinrich. It was certainly time to look again at Heinrich, whose importance as a public and literary figure had been taken for granted by an earlier generation of writers. Gottfried Benn called him ‘one of my gods’; Lion Feuchtwanger ...”