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“... to happen, we might as well enjoy them when they do. (Basically, it’s the argument advanced by Thomas DeQuincey in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.) Football used to take a similar approach. When Frank Rijkaard spat at Rudi Völler in 1990, we were showed the flying lump of gob in slow motion from about ten different angles. But this ...”

“... a sort of new-variant liberalism, has claimed a number of prominent victims, including John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, Brian Barry and even Jürgen Habermas.Surprisingly, Gray pays little attention to it, mentioning the idea only as a historical aberration. It poses problems for him, however, since it cuts across his two-face ...”

“... in Britain and America, and exemplified by even such relatively liberated analytic philosophers as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams) contrasts ‘hard scientific fact’ with ‘the subjective’ or with ‘metaphor’, the second kind – common elsewhere in the world – sees science as one more human activity, not as the ...”

“... it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being ...”

“... Keywords’, Jan Zita Grover runs through a lexicon of Aids vocabulary after the manner of Raymond Williams, angrily expounding the ways in which PLWA (people living with Aids) are linguistically punished by the rest of the community. Her approach is determinedly polemical, so that despite what must be an overwhelming sympathy with many aspects of her ...”

“... This application of the theory of ‘egonomics’ – to use the term coined by Thomas Schelling – is the most original and intriguing part of Kolm’s work. It is also open to various objections which, while not fatal, point to the need for fundamental revisions. First, I believe that his view of the satisfaction and frustration of ...”

“... who care a great deal for the writers of Eastern Europe, and the experiments of William Carlos Williams and the Beats. I’d first met him when I was a student myself, in the Eighties, when travelling across America by car seemed like the right sort of thing to be doing. There was a gang of us then, and we got jobs working in pizza places or in all-night ...”

“... her little, smiling, flirting Sister Julia.’ ‘I admire the Sagacity & Taste of Charlotte Williams,’ the novelist writes approvingly in 1813; ‘those large dark eyes always judge well. I will compliment her, by naming a Heroine after her.’ At times the sexuality of women’s bodies elicits oddly visceral effects: ‘I looked at Sir ...”

“... read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A ...”

“... versions.25 September. ‘I am not going to affect the livery of the time’s prudery’ (R.S. Thomas).3 October. Reading a piece on universities in the TLS brings back Richard Pares, whose last course of lectures I went to at Oxford in 1957. He was plainly dying, lecturing from a wheelchair and barely audible, with another don turning over the pages of ...”

“... texts that look extensively at the slave trade – Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it (1695) – are structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured bodies.Reflecting on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the ...”

“... which, not being especially carnivorous, we find it hard to dispose of. This year, though, Inigo Thomas, having been brought up on such fare, has offered to take them off our hands (and later sends round a brace in a delicious casserole).7 February. Nick H. rings this morning to say they’d been talking over the play at the theatre and the general feeling ...”

“... foolish to love him, to emulate him, to rise to his challenge – there is an odd scene in a Joy Williams story called ‘The Blue Men’. (Do NOT read Joy Williams at the same time as DFW. It will give you a very bad opinion of him.) Two boys, maybe brothers, are playing catch with a tennis ball on a pier. ‘The younger ...”

“... Materialism’, much of its activity remains most fruitfully grounded in the work of Raymond Williams. Both Evans and Dollimore offer powerful examples of the unsettling purchase this newly historicised and politicised British criticism can obtain on the Elizabethan past and the Thatcherised present. Latterly, British concerns have started to make their ...”

“... answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent ...”