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“... Hastily gobled up in five Moneths of travell (1611), a book which, mock-patronised by Prince Henry, is introduced by laboriously facetious mock-encomiums from 56 poets, Donne and Jonson among them. None of the other tributes, however, is so distinctively and explicitly nonsensical as that by Hoskyns: Cabalistical Verses, which by transposition of ...”

“... lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part of the town’, and found him making models and playing with his two adopted boys. When Lord Mount Cashell (who is all but banished from the journals) went off to Orleans, the two women, escorted ...”

“... It would take only two hundred years for this earth to be pounded into dust. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths are among Australia’s most creative historians. Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996) has become the most quoted work of Australian history in new research, and Bonyhady’s The Colonial Earth ...”

“... there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s birth); there’s one by Henry Lamb, painted in 1914; there’s one by Dora Carrington from 1916. In Meade’s book, I was most struck by the following passage about a party in Los Angeles. (Parker, in addition to writing both poetry and fiction, not to mention reviews for the New ...”

“... the last year have attracted a lot of notice. One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests ...”

“... Thomas, who saw White romantically as a wild animal kept safe ‘behind the suburban-zoo bars’. Henry Miller and Alfred Perles (who published some of White’s poems in their magazine the Booster) thought madness ‘a mysterious conundrum to be embraced as intellectually inspiring, an ennobling risk one ran in the creation of great art’ (Dunn’s ...”

“... Fetchit, of the famous boy aviator, Charles Lindbergh. He admired the anti-union, anti-semitic Henry Ford, the prounion FDR, and, like many other Americans, as well as Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini. Taken aback when the dictator greeted him with the Fascist salute, Rogers ducked and said: ‘Don’t shoot.’ Will Rogers denied ever uttering his ...”

“... Over the Missouri, over the Seine,   Over the Thames, and over the Severn, The soul of white Tom   Shall float to Heaven – to Hardy’s ‘rather monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s ...”

“... 1932 with T.S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, whom he was about to leave, she stands calmly beside Tom. Vivienne, seemingly excluded by the successful pair, stands at a distance, hands clasped behind her back, feet together, dressed entirely in white. She was ‘wild as Ophelia’, Woolf wrote, but ‘alas no Hamlet would love her, with her powdered ...”

“... the paintings in the artist’s room line up as an audience or congregation, and a priest, Father Tom, hovers among them, trying to make himself heard over an actual conversation between the artist and his friend on the soundtrack. Johnny, remembering the priest from his childhood, says: ‘We’ve always drowned your voice with our shouting.’ A good thing ...”

“... creepiness of the best Machen. Whimsicality and conscious charm mark his first full-length work, Henry Broeken, a book soaked in literature from the moment that the hero saddles ‘my uncle’s old mare Rosinante’. In Henry Brocken, as in most of the verse for children and some of the poems, de la Mare was a childish ...”

“... that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally frightening and ...”

“... of tan & wrinkles. Like a reptile – though not squamous, not unpleasant. Lively brown eyes.’ Henry Williamson, whom Hughes admired, he describes in a letter to his brother, Gerald, saying he made a mess of his life ‘with Hitlerism’, but has an amazing knowledge of wildlife, ‘though he is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of Donald ...”

“... we do a double-take. Occasionally, there is a flash of recognition. ‘It seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one ...”

“... insurrectionists. The latter were rarely writers and the books they produced are undistinguished. Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland and Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom have their charms, but there was no Herzen or Trotsky capable of distilling the Irish revolutionary mentality and experience into a classic memoir: except for Ernie ...”