Search Results

“... database, two are drawn from works of fiction spoken in the first person; and the third, from Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary, is a line of dialogue (‘ “What is it?” asked Lemprière. “Part of you and I,” said Septimus’). This doesn’t seem to me to be very good evidence for anything, apart from the fact that some novelists ...”

“... as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite (if any remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are ...”

“... verse (from Anon on the structure of the cosmos – ‘as appel the eorthe is round’ – to John Updike on cosmic gall), is therefore fighting a lost battle. The editors make out a brave case for the similarity of poet and scientist (‘the starting-point for both of their activities is the imagination’), dispute old distinctions between ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”

“... Opposite the title-page of Mr Baker’s skeletonised but substantially accurate account of John Anderson’s philosophy there stand two epigraphs. They are both from Heraclitus or, more precisely, from Burnet’s translation of that enigmatic philosopher. The first of them is ontological: ‘The world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures kindling and measures going out ...”

“... brief late letters, which come sandwiched between a chatty domestic bulletin and a letter to Sir John Wolfenden about a BBC radio talk, is compounded by their common recall of Forster’s time in Alexandria, where he spent the First World War in a quasi-military capacity working for the Red Cross. Each records the surprising re-emergence of something long ...”

“... I believe him. But his book will attract a wide and lay readership for the same reasons that made Lawrence Wright’s delightful history of the lavatory, Clean and Decent (1960), a perennial best-seller. And for the reader only mildly interested in French history, Corbin, like Wright, supplies a wealth of fascinating tidbits: for instance, that in the 18th ...”

“... of Hughes’s prose is a protest against civility that announces its pedigree – Bunyan, Milton, Lawrence – in an impulsive vernacular. It lacks subtlety, but it always confronts us with a bloody and engaged directness. The tragic ground of Hughes’s vision is his honest, agonised perception that Protestant England has as its national poet and prime ...”

“... what will come next, and how soon. In New Orleans’s first hundred years, the period covered by Lawrence Powell’s The Accidental City, its existence was imperilled more than a dozen times. The first catastrophic flood occurred in 1719, less than a year after the site was claimed by French settlers. It was ‘the worst overflow the local Indians could ...”

“... intellectuals included some famous names: Bryce, Courtney, Freeman, Lecky, Lowe, J.S. Mill, John Morley. A nervous concern about the consequences of mass franchise, worries about the concessionary mood of the Liberal leaders – especially in the face of violence in Ireland – led many Late Victorian Liberal intellectuals to drift rightwards toward ...”

“... the page. Boswell, a slovenly, scribbling, lovable Scot, and Johnson, a cantankerous old genius, a John Bull himself, now appear to us as creatures of one another’s making. Together they constitute a minor archipelago of literary selves.In the past it seemed natural to admire one at the expense of the other, and most natural of all, to see Boswell as the ...”

“... and then, without bothering to consult the operational War Diaries, proceeds to spin out the John Connell-Correlli Barnett myth that Montgomery’s only contribution to the Desert arena was an incomprehensible uplift in morale. Monty’s plan for the defence of Alam Halfa, he declares, was inherited from Auchinleck: he neglects to mention that ...”

“... the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of ...”

“... She was related by marriage to some of Britain’s most influential families, including the (Lord John) Russells and the Trevelyans; her father, Sir Hugh Bell, was also a Liberal MP. She took a brilliant First in history after only five terms at Oxford, despite enjoying an active social life. Her interest in the East began at 25, when she spent six months at ...”

“... putting fascination in the place of knowledge. In Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth Lawrence Selden sees Lily Bart at Grand Central Station, and wonders ‘what she was doing in town at that season’. He entertains various possibilities because ‘he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she ...”