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“... grew up, Lucretia Jones’s small daughter dutifully replied (as she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually ...”

“... their way. There was an election coming within 18 months and if she lost it they might spend the best years of their political lives in opposition. Meanwhile, if Heseltine won, many of them would be out in the cold anyway. ‘The elders of the tribe, and most of its leading younger members too, wanted a quiet life and their own collective advancement. They ...”

“... insanely generous the next, passionately Catholic and, above all, convinced that he lived in the best of all possible worlds – Sarmatia Felix, the land of Golden Freedom. Bewildered readers may remember the way the Mitford sisters described their ‘Farve’, Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s books. Here was a real English Sarmatian: a ferocious backwoods ...”

“... From Gloucester Out. In other words, poets published poets, signalling their affinities the best way, through production, while continuing to strengthen transatlantic traffic, through readings, academic exchanges, hospitality. Distribution was nicely random, with many of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to ...”

“... the First Folio (1623) and its reprints (1632, 1663-64, 1685), followed by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 ...”

“... and language towards one’s fellow citizens are acceptable or right. This is statute law at its best – picking up and consolidating an incipient and fragile change of social mood, giving it legitimacy and backing it with legal redress. We have certainly not eliminated racial and sexual discrimination, but few would dispute that things would be markedly ...”

“... free Poland. ‘To a large degree, Lithuania is a continuation of Poland,’ he wrote, but ‘the best plan with Poland is to ensure free development to the Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Jews, and to do away with the great advantage of one people over another.’ A federation, an association of independent nations or a single state with self-governing ...”

“... advertisement just to have a laugh. But he could have gone further.We know Ignatius Gallaher best from the story ‘A Little Cloud’ in Dubliners. He is a journalist in London back in Dublin for a brief visit. Gallaher is unmarried, he has a ‘travelled air, well-cut tweed suit and fearless accent’. He wears ‘a vivid orange tie’, calls the Dublin ...”

“... decision-making in certain circumstances that it was partly a case of government knowing what was best, but it wasn’t just that: ‘If we were to lay specifically our thought processes before you,’ he added, ‘they are not just going before you; they are laid before a worldwide range of uncomprehending or malicious commentators.’ This is the point. A ...”

“... very absoluteness of the Cold War borders left a whole series of chinks and crevices. Some of the best were in Berlin, naturally. There was a whole archipelago of tiny islets of West Berlin territory floating offshore in East Germany, connected to their mainland by barbed-wire causeways. There were also places in what had been the city centre where the Wall ...”

“... Determined not to be taken in again, he was aggressively on guard against some of his own best instincts. There was, too, a genuine problem of category. Was Peterley Harvest a novel autobiography or an autobiographical novel? And does it matter whether the book is a memoir or fiction or an ingenious amalgam of the two? Short of the Hitler ...”

“... favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour Declaration, both Balfour and Lloyd George became committed believers in the Zionist cause. Again, this was no obvious manifestation of ...”

“... as well as its other major towns. It was an unprovoked attack, justified on spurious grounds: Tsar Nicholas I claimed that more than ten million Orthodox Christians were imperilled by the indifference and barbarism of their Ottoman overlords. Russia asserted a historic right and duty to protect these people, though the vast majority had expressed no interest ...”

“... that ‘Marvell’s prose was at least as important to civilisation as his poetry.’ In 2005 Nicholas von Maltzahn’s An Andrew Marvell Chronology, an essential handbook, brought the often murky or recalcitrant biographical materials to order and gave us the first rounded picture of his literary and political career. Not that Marvell will ever be easy ...”

“... which is currently showcasing the Stockists and their polemic exhibition, The Resignation of Sir Nicholas Serota. There are no other browsers when I visit the place, but the custodian is babbling on the phone: ‘It was a very cheap way to do up this building which was redundant.’ Drummond, responding to the requirement to ...”