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“... the college discovered no trace of Archer (or the course he said he attended) in their records. Christopher Wilson, in unpublished research for the Daily Express, could find only three O levels, taken over two years, attached to Archer’s name in the fine print of the Wellington Weekly News. But these are petty questions compared to Archer’s American ...”

“... personal identification which disavow personality. Take, for instance, a poem from the collection King Log (1968), subtitled ‘A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam’, and entitled ‘Tristia: 1891-1938’. It is quoted in full: Difficult friend, I would have preferred You to them. The dead keep their sealed lives And again I am too late. Too late The ...”

“... or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with the deer forests about which his rich schoolfellows used to ...”

“... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks ...”

“... that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an ...”

“... Bend in the River); and monstrous post-colonial abuse had followed. He didn’t actually say that King Leopold, bad though he was, was probably not much worse than Mobutu, or Idi Amin, or Mugabe, but he allowed one to think it. And when he sought to expose what he called ‘the great lie’ about colonialism by emphasising the miscegenation and transgressive ...”

“... several examples of slaves who named their children after Dunmore, offered praise to the distant king or identified themselves as Britons whenever their free status was challenged. But the actions of the British during the Revolution did not demonstrate a consistent or durable commitment to black freedom. Lord Dunmore and his successors refused to free the ...”

“... The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in July 1954, The Two Towers in November and The Return of the King almost a year later, in October 1955. Lewis wrote a dust-jacket puff: ‘No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its inner laws.’ You do not have to admire the book to think that this was true. It is clear from ...”

“... to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ordinary human disarray among matters that are too large, too consequential for us. Alert too to see that Shakespeare represents this case not only dramatically but also through his character’s choice of an individual word. But ...”

“... megachurch, for being too timid about his commitment to Christ in an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live. Osteen has written a string of national bestsellers and his congregation in Houston has become so large that he’s converted the local NBA basketball arena into a church with 17,000 seats. Beyond the personal rivalries and posturing of evangelical ...”

“... about her, usually in snobbish terms. The snobbery is equally distributed between left and right. Christopher Isherwood called her ‘quite a common little thing’. Richard Eyre said that ‘if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor ...”

“... that his name be pronounced ‘Pole’ because of his supposed descent from a 12th-century Welsh king, and to the fact that Powell thought the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time was on a par with the novels of Evelyn Waugh. After years of mutual antagonism, the feud came to a spectacular climax in 1990 when Powell published a collection of his ...”

“... am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”

“... trying to form a provisional government under the regency of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the former king’s daughter-in-law, who was sitting calmly in the chamber. But the masses didn’t want a regency; they wanted revolution. Their presence swung the balance of power towards the radical opposition, which promptly announced the birth of the Second ...”

“... lamented that Rousseau had died before discovering his ideal island. Swinburne wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. Temperatures avoid extremes; camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a ...”