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“... to do with religion and a text by Eric Griffiths which Cronin, understandably, misattributes to Christopher Ricks in Beckett’s Dying Words. Griffiths’s edifying send-off was impressive even by the standards of the ghastlier forms of obituary-speak: ‘Catholics pray for the dead that they be granted refrigerii sedem, quiet-is beatitudinem, et lumines ...”

“... Much or the last volume of Proust’s novel is devoted to life in Paris during the First World War. Proust, the least chauvinistic of writers, is nevertheless so moved by patriotic sentiment as to transgress the convention which keeps a fictional world separate from its author: In this book in which there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise ...”

“... to ‘a’? Quoting the same sentence in his preface to the full set of new translations, Christopher Prendergast writes: ‘all paradises are lost paradises.’ This is impeccably aphoristic, and assumes that false paradises are just not paradises at all. Proust himself could be more accommodating, and at one point implies that almost anything ...”

“... enjoyments of the tourist city are still possible – more possible, and more permissible, than Christopher Prendergast suggests – and they are surely more appealing than the glum romanticising of awfulness by which many city-dwellers manage simultaneously to accuse and congratulate themselves. But of course ...”

“... to which On Modern Authority belongs – currently a rather overcrowded one – is summed up by Christopher Prendergast in The Order of Mimesis as ‘a critique of authority in which, from the terms of the critique itself, what is at once presumed and indefensible is the authority of the critique’. Prendergast’s ...”

“... thing.’ The problem, as this revised possibility suggests, lies not with the facts but with what Christopher Prendergast calls ‘fact-complacency’ and ‘fact-naturalisation’. ‘The “facts”,’ Prendergast writes, ‘can have an imprisoning rather than an anchoring effect, as the mask that ...”

“... as well as the unbridgeable, while evoking something that is certainly dangerous to approach. Christopher Prendergast FranceTwo days before the Brexit referendum Le Parisien reported that 34 French businesses had written an open letter intended for the British press – the Sun was mentioned, along with the Times and the Telegraph. ‘French bosses ...”

“... will also translate the last volume, but no announcement has been made about the intervening ones. Christopher Prendergast’s six-volume edition for Penguin (2002) is still in print and much read. The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott ...”

“... and there is a good deal of violence and misery in the 1930s novels. Paul’s harmless friend Mr Prendergast gets his head sawn off by a prisoner who has successfully resisted his institution’s enlightened regime; the ditzy party girl Agatha in Vile Bodies descends into mania thanks to her traumatic experience racing fast cars, and lies dying unnoticed ...”

“... Waugh’s predilection is to be found in Decline and Fall, written before his conversion, where Mr Prendergast confesses to a very special doubt: ‘You see it wasn’t the ordinary sort of doubt about Cain’s wife, or the Old Testament miracles or the Consecration of Archbishop Parker ... No, it was something deeper than that. I couldn’t understand why God ...”