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Milvain’s skilful efforts notwithstanding, ‘Mr Bailey, Grocer,’ had no success. By two publishers the book had been declined; the firm which brought it out offered the author half profits and fifteen pounds on account, greatly to Harold Biffen’s satisfaction. But reviewers in general were...

The past twelve months had added several years to Edwin Reardon’s seeming age; at thirty-three he would generally have been taken for forty. His bearing, his personal habits, were no longer those of a young man; he walked with a stoop and pressed noticeably...

Michael Snowdon—to distinguish the old man by name from the son who thus unexpectedly returned to him—professed no formal religion. He attended no Sunday service, nor had ever shown a wish that Jane should do so. We have Been that he used the Bible...

Through the day and through the evening Clara Hewett had her place behind Mrs. Tubbs’s bar. For daylight wear, the dress which had formerly been her best was deemed sufficient ; it was simple, but not badly made, and became her figure. Her evening...

in the trenches of Sebastopol, when a young officer who was just the age of Wilfred Owen abandoned Stendhal's view of the hero in war and decided that, "By virtue of my oath and still more because of my feeling for humanity, I cannot be silent." His advocacy of non-resistance came later, but Isaiah Berlin's conclusion that Tolstoy's "sense of reality was . . . too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world," reads rather strangely only a decade after it was written.