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“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”

“... funeral procession to Brookwood Crematorium required three special trains and was attended by many young men who were to be heard much of in the next century, notably Gandhi and Lloyd George. Lord Queensberry was also present, to bear witness to his loathing of ‘Christian tomfoolery’. So was Walter Sickert, who painted the enormous portrait of Bradlaugh ...”

“... many, both in Demosthenes’ day and in our own, would dispute. For Worthington, as for those like Arthur Pickard-Cambridge who made a hero out of Demosthenes a century ago, ‘patriot’ is a label that excuses many shortcomings and failures. Worthington admits that in his early career, Demosthenes’ speeches were ‘self-serving’ and political ambition ...”

“... the likes of Louis Cordier, Zacharie Astruc, Otto Scholderer, Pierre-Elzéar Bonnier, Jean Aicard, Arthur Boisseau, Antoine Lascoux and so on. And our pity contains an admixture, not exactly of guilt, but of unease: we are the posterity that has consigned them to oblivion. We look at these pictures – at first, anyway – as anecdotal, as documentary. It’s ...”

“... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...”

“... biographies since the 1990s, while The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), edited by J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, were reissued in 1997 and supplemented with Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell in 2000. Gaskell’s image, too, was transformed: the married woman whose earnings were pocketed by her husband, the Rev. William Gaskell, gave way to a canny, adaptable ...”

“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... by knowing the first publication was anonymous). Are there readers who are ignorant of Arthur Henry Hallam and all that? Well, yes, there are, as any teacher of Victorian literature has cause to lament. The question arises: what does it mean to read such a poem without even the beginnings of contextual knowledge? It may be argued that the anthology ...”

“... for the TLS all this time? FW: Yes, though I stopped with a thud when Alan Pryce-Jones left and Arthur Crook came. I think I was too associated in his mind with the frivolity of the Pryce-Jones era. AH: Wasn’t the TLS lively and good under Pryce-Jones? FW: I thought it was, I loved it. It was very unLeavisite, or anything like that. I think it made Leavis ...”

“... to be written down, but like other such offers, this one is made only, I think, when one is fairly young. Most of us are self-sentenced to a year or more of un-epiphanic hard labour, made worse by a suspicion that it’s all a waste of time anyway. Morning after morning you go unwillingly to the desk, always accompanied by the treacherous notion that after all ...”

“... travels Scotland towards the end of his life, gauging morale and wondering what system could help young folk to flourish. Kenneth White, a Glaswegian based in Brittany and professor at the Sorbonne, is for ever wondering, as he walks the beaches of Western Europe, which place is home for him. Beveridge and Turnbull, ...”

“... was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned down on religious grounds by the first great love of his life, the daughter of a great Anglican family. In the aftermath of this rejection, he thought ‘a definitely agnostic atmosphere is essential for my free development of work and of ...”

“... Human Rights.) He is the chancellor of the International Monarchist League, a theorist about King Arthur, and a four-time parliamentary candidate for Ukip. According to The Making of the Novelist (2004), the first volume of his biography, excessive popular enthusiasm for the League of Nations, ‘self-indulgent expressions of concern for the poor’ and a ...”

“... picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his shoulder; Sir Joshua has his ear ...”

“... drove the swelling tide of revolution. Reading of them now, one is inevitably reminded of the young Russians of the same period and their excited dabblings in what their counterparts in the 1960s would call ‘alternative lifestyles’. Foster cites ‘feminism, socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-vivisectionism’ as beliefs impelling the revolutionary ...”