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“... to be written. Neither Melville, Twain, Faulkner nor Hemingway had quite managed it, and Henry James had defected to England. From Henry Miller to J.D. Salinger, any aspiring genius who did not have a shot at it was not doing his duty by Uncle Sam. The truth is, of course, that the GAN had long been written – for what is Moby Dick if not the Great White ...”

“... the press. The method, like Greene’s, is highly effective, but it can never produce what Henry James would have called ‘saturation’. Virginia Woolf remarked that A Handful of Dust was a brilliant novel but that she didn’t believe a word of it: a way of turning round the ordinary reader’s cliché to suggest that truth in fiction has a complex and ...”

“... and ‘Vigorous’ Gothic mannerism of men such as S.S. Teulon, as well as the secular Gothic of Scott and Butterfield. It was also valuable for its discussion of the origins of the domestic styles of Nesfield and Shaw, and for dealing at length with the work of George Devey, that recondite designer of genuine Jacobean houses for Liberal politicians. Dr ...”

“... addition to the calendar is Edinburgh’s Christmas, which runs throughout December. The Walter Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens – once the biggest memorial to a writer in the world – is dwarfed by an enormous fairground ride called Around the World XXL, which lifts customers hundreds of feet in the air and swings them round the gardens, their ...”

“... were popular and sentimental, influenced by the most vivid storytellers of the day: Dumas, Hugo, Scott, Sue, Feuillet. One scholar, Giovanni Cecchetti, has said of Unapeccatrice (1866), that it is ‘repetitious and overextended, and it seems to have been written in a state of sexual delirium’. These were stories of ambitious young gentlemen who fall in ...”

“... Already any number of hands, licensed and otherwise, have helped to further the adventures of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Billy Bunter and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead ...”

“... fragment from the early 1680s, ‘Hear my Prayer, O Lord’, a two-and-a-half minute howl in C minor, relentlessly unfurling its dissonance and grinding chromaticism, you’ve heard everything that’s important in music, and can skip straight to the 20th century. Or so it seemed to me. My sister was studying the Renaissance composer Gesualdo, a kind of ...”

“... with more fillers than prizes. The best things are from the youngest contributors, such as James Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst, and the less youthful A.E. Ellis. Each here performs the same narrative trick, telling some resonant or portentous tale through more or less awkward or impercipient or blindly obsessive observers. In Hollinghurst’s ‘A ...”

“... very easy after all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when such masters as Henry James, Conrad and Ford were agonising a lot about modern technique, but although he seems to have found the business of technique quite interesting – or rather, although he made a few knowing nods in that direction – what he really liked was to get on with ...”

“... close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that preceded it. Henry James​ , who was fascinated by Browning, spoke in an obituary piece about ‘the bristling surface of his actuality’: stylistically, the poetry is full of bristles, musically rough and jagged, full of dashes and exclamation marks, syntactically ...”

“... faux-documentary comedy about a chat show, The Larry Sanders Show (1992-98), which he co-produced and co-wrote for HBO, and starred in as the eponymous host. The chat show scenes were shot as if in a traditional studio, the hyper-cynical behind-the-scenes bitching and bickering on a handheld camera. Celebrities ...”

“... Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s. The City was estranged as a result of Royal attacks on municipal and corporate privileges which have long ...”

“... The population is praised for puffing its way stoically through the shrieking pieties of King James I, whose pamphlet on the matter warned loyal subjects that it was ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs’. The tendency of those in authority to show who’s in charge by issuing no-smoking ...”

“... the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international co-operation, perhaps especially where Russia is in question.’ There is a decided suggestion of Communist fellow-travelling. Partisan Review began its career in 1933 as an organ devoted to the interests of the Communist Party. The liberal imagination means (to ...”

“... batch of studies finds, in the USA, Peter Plan and T.G. Bishop combing the plays for miracles and James Biester finding the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as well to remember that in cooler moments Jonson complained that ...”