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“... so well into Post-Modernism that Neo-Modernism must be just over the hill. Indeed, according to Frank Kermode, we passed out of Palaeo-Modernism some time ago (imperceptibly, one presumes, as through the tail of a comet). He might, however, be consoled by the knowledge that artists themselves are confused, though themselves in turn consoled by remembering ...”

“... life form. Freud had turned away from realism: his 1960s technique is closer to expressionism.Frank Auerbach described Cuthbertson as ‘a sweet girl’ who ‘worked with the kindergarten in Brunswick Square’. Freud met her at a party hosted by Blackwood’s brother. ‘Lucian thought there were lots of girls like her, very, very nice.’ The last ...”

“... their pardon           that for a barren passion’s sake, Although I have come close on forty-nine, I have no child, I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine. And it seemed more proof of his value was needed. Before the decade was out he was married and a father. Although the early days of the marriage ...”

“... alteration’ an editor would have to introduce would make such a text almost useless for close study; that it would be naive to suppose the spelling reproduced was that of the author; and that to believe the old spelling imparted ‘an Elizabethan flavour’ to the words was a pseudo-historical nonsense, for the strangeness of the spelling isn’t ...”

“... On the contrary, it is difficult to think of a writer of equal fame and importance who, on close inspection, proves to be such an admirable and sympathetic human being. Rosamund Bartlett’s work is not a conventional biography, unrolling the familiar facts of Chekhov’s life once again, but rather a study of the world in which he lived and ...”

“... like a guest at a party, a garden party perhaps: the light is clear and bright. You can get as close as you like to examine fabric and stitching and to look at backs and fronts. There are frocks and jackets, shirts, skirts, shifts, suits and coats showing an astonishing variety of techniques, materials, influences and inventions. There is nothing of the ...”

“... of these stories is a little astounding, even by Updike’s standards. In ‘Natural Colour’, Frank, stuck in his flavourless marriage (‘he had opted for a wife, and a wife she was, no less or more’), recalls an old flame, Maggie, and an earlier life of real and desired adulteries: ‘Driving back from taking the babysitter home, ...”

“... editor wanted but the Estate withheld, occupies hardly more than a hundred pages, the commentary close to three times as many. A highly informative introduction adds another ninety or so. Haffenden’s easy, expansive manner cannot quite disguise the quantity, care and detail of his work. Reading such an elaborate edition one has an uncharitable keenness to ...”

“... Oxford editions were a pleasure to use. If one struggles on to the end, the reward is a moving close-up of the great man in his last years. He was 74 when he gave his Leslie Stephen performance (‘that infernal lecture’, he now called it). He had now even less reason to rejoice in the human condition or in the Latinity of his epoch. ‘I can bear my ...”

“... debate about the purpose of literary criticism and its relation to ‘theory’. Addressing Frank Kermode has its origin in a conference devoted to Kermode’s work. Five papers selected from those delivered at the conference are followed by a reply from Kermode himself; five more follow which ‘acknowledge, more or less directly’, his ...”

“... There are some curious aspects to Frank Lentricchia’s study of four Modernist poets: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. For a start, it’s a book about poets which doesn’t seem much interested in poems. Lentricchia has written a lengthy chapter on each member of his quartet. Yet Eliot is represented by ‘The Love Song of J ...”

“... in the left-wing Seventies. No gap could have been wider than that dividing two nominal moderates. Frank Chapple of the Electricians and David Basnett of the G and M. Chapple began the tradition of heroic truculence, justifiable if unsubtle anti-Communism, double arm’s-length relations with the TUC General Council and aggressive modernisation. Basnett, an ...”

“... of anti-psychiatry. ‘It is in the battle on the wrong side; the side of those who want to close down intensive psychiatric units and throw the victims of mental illness onto the streets.’ There is an example of the kind of thing Sedgwick is up against in The Voice of Experience. One of Laing’s new atrocity stories involves a young woman with a ...”

“... eccentric, and for a long time afterwards plugged his un-Movementish poetry. Wain was also close to C.S. Lewis, who had very little in common with these young men except a liking for beer and (important in Wain’s case) a love of scholarship. But it is a fact rarely mentioned that even in wartime, Oxford was a highly competitive place, and these men ...”

“... human race if only the remaining quarter survived to be communists. The Thirties were perhaps too close, and the writing loses force, though God’s fifth column – the power which, working for God, sabotages human complacency and human ambitions – was certainly hard at work in those years. The book is full of deft juxtapositions and fine, self-indulgent ...”