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Well, this did send me back to the text of <i>To the Lighthouse</i>
to find the sequence where Lily praises Mr Ramsay's boots. The novel
is actually full of boots. There is an artist in Panama hat and
yellow boots, Mrs Ramsay reports that her husband would talk by the
hour about his boots, and Mr Bankes felt felt rigid and barren, like
a pair of boots that have been soaked and gone dry so that you can
hardly force your feet into them. A rough count in an electronic
text reveals that "boot" and its cognates occur 24 times in the
novel. Is Van Gogh lurking somewhere in the text?<br>
<br>
Jeremy Hawthorn<br>
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