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“... way. To the end of his days, he had no idea who his father was. Erikson’s name may now ring a bell for very few people, and even they may be surprised to realise that he died only a few years ago. He had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to have begun in the mid-1950s, when his book ...”

“... the New Republic, as chairman of the American Veterans’ Committee and as a liberal supporter of Henry Wallace, Michael Straight became for a time a quite vigorous and effective opponent of the Communist Party of the United States in the years before the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy got into their stride. He was lucky to escape their ...”

“... not a stroll among the great monuments of a now canonised modern period – a diving bell into Post-Modernity, if you will. This term must be understood as referring to a scene and historical situation, rather than designating a style itself by now relatively antiquated (of the great Post-Modernist names – Charles Moore, for instance – very ...”

“... And yet, Malcolm believes, Plath ‘did not write – and could not have written – The Bell Jar or Ariel in her native Massachusetts’. She needed to shed her American accent, appearance, identity, to become an artist; ‘like so many women writers, she had to leave the daylight world and go underground to find her voice.’ Not only Plath but the ...”

“... or ways of forming adverbs, as well as by citations and references. (The thing which first rang a bell in Alice Kelly’s mind was Metesky’s use of the plural word ‘injustices’, accompanied by a threat ‘to take justice in my own hands’; both the word and the phrase also occurred in the Mad Bomber letters.) Some of the evidence in these cases is ...”

“... playmates and arrange a proper reunion. Having put Rabbit Angstrom to rest and closed the book on Henry Bech, Updike understands the formalities of reintroducing characters who have been kept in storage. It’s been more than two decades since the original novel and the mental picture of its warlock and witches was colonised by the movie version, remembered ...”

“... around the subject, sometimes a short walk, sometimes a full-scale peregrination in two parts (Henry V, The Best Years of Our Lives) and once, for sentimental reasons, three parts (Monsieur Verdoux). The prose is nicely adapted to allow for both humour and gravity, and for something in between, a wry or sombre thoughtfulness: a surprising instrument alike ...”

“... African story he told were shown to be without empirical foundation. But none of this mattered. Henry Louis Gates got it right when he said in a 1998 interview that Roots is a ‘work of the imagination’. This may be the reason it captured the imagination of millions and why genealogical work began a new phase of expansion. New organisations were ...”

“... process gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself ...”

“... no reason to think that Orwell was fundamentally different from Mark Twain or George Eliot or O. Henry or Rebecca West. Certainly his motives for writing under a name other than his own seem straightforward enough. He was writing about his life among the ‘lowest of the low’, and his lower-upper-middle-class family might be embarrassed by his ...”

“... issued with explosive-packed sky rockets to be let off in case of any disturbance. At 5 a.m. the bell of St George’s Church, Southwark, began tolling and spectators started to stream silently towards it through the dark and freezing streets. By the time it stopped an hour later, every vantage point around the jail was packed solid. The impending execution ...”

“... for determining specific gravities; all manner of timekeepers; a universal joint; a diving bell; a bullet-proof vest; a ‘sailing chariot’; a velocipede; improvements to the camera obscura, oil lamps and musical instruments, and in techniques for staining marble, printing maps and milling apples; and a formal method for producing an endless supply ...”

“... moiling was still ahead of him.) Fifty years later, we are all, in Berryman’s sardonic words, ‘Henry House’, all ‘the steadiest man on the block’, and the stronger the reaction against the confessional poets, the more prominence accrues to Bishop’s self-exemption, the more stark and heroic and solitary her small output seems, the more remarkable ...”

“... muliebre’) was an element in a nun’s attire – because he had read a satire on Sir Henry Vane which said ‘They talk’t of his having a Cardinalls Hat,/They’d send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat’ – is something of an old chestnut, but there are some other less well-known juicy bits here. The late 18th-century use of the word ...”