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“... to do more than ensure consistency, Plato was returning to a point at which he started. In Ulysses James Joyce quotes (or misquotes) Maeterlinck as saying: ‘If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep.’ The same, I have urged, can be said about Plato; or even about ...”

“... a chapter that devotes far more of its time to writers like the Sitwells than it does to Joyce, Pound and Lawrence, all three of whom receive no more than a handful of glancing allusions in the book as a whole. There is a single brief reference to Pound’s Cantos and four mentions of Wyndham Lewis. Sylvia Plath’s name surfaces only twice. The ...”

“... was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...”

“... and he asks: ‘Might we not distinguish in kind between literary promotion, such as Pound’s for Joyce, in war or peace, and advocacy such as Pound’s for Mussolini in war rather than peace?’ Well, so we might, but we might also think that ‘literary promotion’ is an inadequate description of Pound’s sustained and inventive activities on behalf of ...”

“... understand her specific role in Bloomsbury, and what differentiated her from others in the group. James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us an opportunity to think anew about these questions, condensing, as it does, twenty years of scholarship and research since Quentin Bell’s classic two-volume Life came out in the early ...”

“... the one side and honestly unserious Wodehouse or Ian Fleming, say, on the other – Waugh, Greene, Joyce, you name it – will have for him something of the status of kitsch or poshlost, will be fundamentally untrue, in some way. The problem for the critic is not just that the Tolstoyan or Shakespearean or Pushkinian ideal is an impossibly high one (even ...”

“... the ‘clerisy’, a sort of secular priesthood. The artist as secular priest crops up as late as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as Stephen Dedalus exchanges consecrating the eucharist for that transformation of the bread of daily experience into the host of sacred nourishment which he calls art. Flaubert and ...”

“... John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the virtuosity and the outrageous power of the command of language that gave ...”

“... in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very special piety ties him to the ...”

“... Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who hung out with New Yorker writers and married one of them; a big personality piece about an Italian carter named Joe Cantalupo who was a fixture of the ...”

“... are not unreal, and this is partly why readers can never decide who he is like: is it Dickens, or Joyce, or Kafka, or Faulkner, or Nabokov, or García Márquez, or Rushdie? Two of the realisms that ground these dense fantasies are Carey’s ability to animate even minor characters with a flick of novelistic attention, and his great interest in the warped ...”

“... equally subtle ways of thwarting clichés, whether of the page, the mind or the heart. He regards Joyce as the great master of the art of ‘hoisting’ the cliché ‘with its own petard’. ‘The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace’: so begins the Nausicaa section of Ulysses, described here as ‘one of the greatest ...”

“... by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, and aware also of the new rules of the game as promulgated by Henry James with his passion for ‘doing’. Bennett greatly admired Conrad, but decided against this kind of ‘doing’. The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) was almost contemporary with Nostromo, which he called ‘the finest novel of this generation’; but his own ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”

“... Morningside Heights there’s an enormous residential tower which in 1932 replaced the Henry James, an apartment house built at the turn of the 20th century and advertised to appeal to ‘refined persons’. When William Dean Howells first told James about the building, James replied ...”