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“... exciting risk of our mutual revelations. Was there a limit between us? Would disgust ever outweigh love?’ Baker would next try for himself the anxious delights of the confessional mode. A compelling and often uncomfortable read, U and I (1991) owns up to an ‘intense, rivalrous, touchy admiration’ for Updike. It also reveals an unexpectedly large gap ...”

“... and the individual talent for the most part with great skill. I suspect that Watson’s greatest love is for the Dissenting or near-Dissenting tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries – Baxter, Charles Wesley, Watts (‘When I survey the wondrous Cross’ receives ten full pages). Though he is generally broad in his sympathies, at one or two moments he ...”

“... new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a Fake, about the Ern Malley hoax, Carey delights in stripping authorship of authority, and in floating the heretical ...”

“... casualties in the first 24 hours of an air attack. ‘We thought of air warfare in 1938,’ Harold Macmillan recalled after the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, ‘rather like people think of nuclear warfare today.’ During Munich week in September 1938, and again in September 1939, when three million people fled London in the first days of the war, many ...”

“... services of a nanny, Erika, 23, buoyant and brave, someone with a real but properly uncompeting love of the children in her care. David, when he’s home, doesn’t regard maleness as disqualifying him from an equal share of chores and caring, even if he does have a knack for sleeping on when the children make demands at night. Dreading his absence ...”

“... de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he ...”

“... pretty that she makes you laugh. I trust no don involved will get litigious For being likened to a love-sick calf – I understand completely how the urge’ll Emerge to call a virgin a new Virgil. A summer madness that began in Spring The Sue Affair’s explained by a don’s life. His winter schedule is a humdrum thing And often the same goes for the don’s ...”

“... Fitzgerald wrote to her daughter Maria in 1974. ‘I wonder if you feel you have a 1st one! But we love you very much and that must count for something.’ To Carduff in 1987 she remarked that ‘on the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.’ In later ...”

“... literary works are made up of recycled bits and pieces of other works, so that, in the words of Harold Bloom, ‘the meaning of a poem is another poem.’ This doctrine of intertextuality is not to be confused with good old-fashioned literary influence. Such influences are mostly conscious and generally sporadic, whereas for Postmodernism it is impossible ...”

“... is only as a memory that he finds Ireland bearable.) Even when writing to his fellow cricket-lover Harold Pinter and dreaming of going to the Oval with him one day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send ...”

“... is an inspection, and a dismissal, of conventional marriage, of the run-down tradition of romantic love which Lawrence calls ‘lovey-doveyness’; of the rituals, here represented by ‘spooning’, which lead up to marriage; of the consequences of going too far in spooning; and of the later settled-down respectability summed up by the Sunday joint and the ...”

“... currency we’ve got, then what is? ‘Unconscious motivation,’ Lear wrote in his previous book, Love and Its Place in Nature, can be thought of as striving to be understood. Of course, in the most basic sense, unconscious wishes are striving to get themselves satisfied. But the fact that love is a basic force in the ...”

“... to the febrile frailty of the friendships. A typical progress is to begin by delighting in, say, Harold Nicolson for not being an owl (‘Sexually, I represent a buffer state,’ said the old buffer-bugger), and to end with dark mutterings: ‘Most unpleasant memory of last six months was drink with Nicolson in Café Royal. He must have been trying to ...”

“... Handsome Lady’ the widowed Caroline tells the unhappily married John that ‘if there is love between you there is faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity,’ but he’s too slow to take the hint or too worried there would be gossip, and by the time his wife dies the widow is already dead. And in ...”

“... behind a large body of work, now available in full for the first time in a magisterial edition by Harold Brooks, begun over fifty years ago. This includes the fierce ‘Juvenalian’ satires for which he is mainly remembered, but also much else: imitations (sometimes brilliant) of Horace, Ovid and other Latin poets, as well as of Greek poets, and Boileau and ...”