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“... and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith, nor through celebratory odes … still less through the erection of ...”

“... nothing momentous need happen at all. If we simply keep doing what we are doing, then to the best of our knowledge, more and more of the planet will catch fire or be submerged under water; coastlines will wash away, glaciers collapse and rivers dry up; soils will desiccate and blow away; and millions will be on the move or dying of disease. To put it in ...”

“... When the Texan six-footer Tom Huff wished to make it big with a ‘bodice-ripper’ (currently the best-selling genre in America), he was obliged to change his name to the outrageously feminine Jennifer Wilde. Love’s Tender Fury made him/her a millionaire, but also something of a laughing-stock in the book trade. Given the present economics of fiction and ...”

“... saw themselves as part of a ‘sane and pragmatic’ political process. His attitude to truth is best described as dynamic. In the aftermath of the shooting, he recounted, his corporal of horse, Chudleigh, ‘a tough Bristolian’, had looked at him so solemnly ‘that I could not resist the temptation to say: “Kiss me, Chudleigh.”’ Having failed to ...”

“... Bagshaw, a shabby but not disagreeable literary operator, who brings out some of Powell’s best comic writing. Bagshaw has been taken as a representation of Malcolm Muggeridge, a connection which Powell, in his Journals, first denies then half accepts. Well, perhaps he just denies intending it. ‘This too never intended,’ he notes – the other ...”

“... pluckily standing her ground. The young man has a really mean face and the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is doing when he spots a small woman in her sixties at the other end of the counter looking at cosmetics. ‘And that goes for you too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of ...”

“... how the story of his play, Orvet, was inspired by his survival in a car crash which killed his best friend; and in 1963 he tells a New York Times journalist that the idea for La Grande Illusion came to him when, while shooting Toni, he crossed paths with a pilot who had saved his life many years earlier. Both in the letters and in Ma vie et mes films we ...”

“... blur of his mufti. ‘Are you filming?’ he said. ‘Filming what?’ said the cameraman, James Nicholas. The priest said: ‘Please don’t show this family.’ James reached along the stock of the camera and flicked a switch. Trimming what you film has become second nature in the province. Camera crews do not favour the faces of RUC officers; the cabbies ...”

“... did much more than either Souter or Gloag for Stagecoach. Margaret Thatcher and her eager disciple Nicholas Ridley privatised the National Bus Company in 1985. The ‘thinking’ behind this measure came from organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. To the boffins there the publicly-owned National Bus Company was a vast ...”

“... kind, its sum is not greater than its component parts, which vary widely in quality. Perhaps the best essay – J.G.A. Pocock’s – is also one of the few which attempt to define radicalism. It reassesses WASP political ideologues between 1688 and 1776 and admits some oppositional Tories and some capitalists to a share in virtu. Christopher Hill supplies ...”

“... Amidst a grief-stricken population Solzhenitsyn wanted to jump for joy. Much as the death of Nicholas I ultimately made the suspension of Dostoevsky’s permanent exile possible, so now events were set in train that would lead to the rise of Khrushchev, de-Stalinisation and Solzhenitsyn’s own rehabilitation. Before this could happen, however, it seemed ...”

“... Street tremble), but the length – almost twelve hours. This was an attempt (as was the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby) to dramatise the whole of a serious book and never mind how long it takes. The distillation and elision that have always been the main concern of adapters suddenly seem out-dated. Harold Pinter’s reduction of Remembrance of Things Past to 163 ...”

“... As Patrick explains to his friend Johnny Hall, ‘I happen to think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since … well, since my father’s death.’ This gruesome story is no doubt given much of its power by the fact that Patrick and his family are portraits from life – ‘uninvented’, as St Aubyn has said. The author was raped by ...”

“... from pre-Presidential days.’ They included Cecil Spring Rice, an Englishman who had served as best man at his wedding and had been in the British Embassies at Berlin, Constantinople and St Petersburg, and Arthur Hamilton Lee, a Tory MP. According to Morris, ‘their urbane, literate reports’ kept Roosevelt up to date ‘with court affairs and privileged ...”

“... religious orders. He was one of the most admired dons of his generation and, for McFarlane, the best evidence of Wyclif’s eminence is that it was almost universally acknowledged, even by his enemies. Even Archbishop Arundel conceded that he was ‘a great clerk’. Evans tells us as much and more about the study and pursuit of logic, philosophy and ...”