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“... His analytic method is familiar to literary critics going about their normal secular business. In reading any narrative we have to supply material missing from the text, usually to construct character or motive. The gospels are terse in style and leave more than most stories to the imagination of the reader. Their gaps and discrepancies are not, as was once ...”

“... at exactly the same moment.’ A ceiling fan is rattling slightly in the room in which I am reading Dehaene’s book. I think I can process the word ‘occupied’ – the last word I read before putting the book aside for a moment – while also taking in the rattle. Can I really? It does take a certain kind of settling-in, but there they are, the two ...”

“... video of him reciting his most famous poem has had just 585 hits; only 107 people have heard his reading of ‘Strambotti’. Prince’s publishing career began early, and in the brightest manner possible. Eliot accepted a number of his early poems for publication in the Criterion, and Prince was only 26 when Faber issued his first collection (austerely ...”

“... in telling the story of the growth of his own mind, and this story takes the form of a romance of reading. By his own account, Bloom is an obsessive reader, with a ‘preternatural memory’ for poems. The risk of such critical virtues, naturally, is that they can poison intuitive powers of response. The pleasures of early ...”

“... tribes of an expanding American subculture, and gave them a name and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen ...”

“... qualities, but also Kant’s more formidable ones. Beer suggests that Carlyle’s ‘balked reading’ of Kant made the latter ‘a vigorous figure within Carlyle’s intellectual dramas’. It is an interesting idea, but Beer is content merely to raise it. The problem is that she is anxious not to write crudely about the intellectual or artistic ...”

“... poems on each of: natural magic, cats, railways, married life, childhood, and the Victorian age. Reading the many historical poems in this book – they make up as much as one-third, and are among the best – it struck me that they all had something medieval about them. Which I interpret as meaning that the incontrovertible realia of the past are always ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... possible to write poems.’ Richler includes some grimly beautiful counter-examples, among them Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, a poem which incorporates Adorno’s point:                     Such death, says the painter, is worthwhile – it makes a colour never known. It makes a sight that’s unimagined, says the ...”

“... Dryasdust has had his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the ...”

“... sentences: While Frederika dozed, Blaise went into the men’s section of the pool house, where Peter had observed his sister, Enid, being made love to by Clay Overbury, now her husband, as well as aide to Senator James Burden Day, whose daughter, Diana, was becoming, more and more, the center of Peter’s ...”

“... non-Jewish middle class. Nor did all Jews fit the rational-liberal stereotype. Some, like the poet Peter Altenberg, would have been more at home in the Place Pigalle. Others, like Friedrich Eckstein – typically, the university-educated son of an industrialist – moved from vegetarian Wagnerism through theosophy to the occultism that in Vienna became the ...”

“... calf’s number is up (given that it can no longer be exported). But there is another way of reading the same question, which will naturally appeal to those who still do not repent for having joined the SDP in the first place. For it is still arguable that it was not their behaviour but that of the Labour Party in the early Eighties which was aberrant ...”

“... change your lifestyle, break bonds and escape binds. Jack finds it odd that his father should be reading about changes in direction so close to the end of the road. Happenstance is rather good at showing how no time of life is free from its worries. It might have been constructed to supply case-studies of the crises in which self-help books deal. The ...”

“... is as if we are enabled to dream by taking as our own the notation of someone else’s dream.’ Reading this Tiepolo is like watching a movie with someone who is more interested in the work of the director and the cinematographer than in the original story. (The analogy works in another way: Tiepolo was a painter-director, supervising the work of others and ...”