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“... distinguish herself. At Oxford she met another offspring of a famous dynasty, T.H. Huxley’s son, Leonard. The young man had been a brilliant undergraduate. Should he marry, he would forfeit a career in law, politics or the university. To support a family he would have to take up schoolmastering, where his agnosticism would hold him back and his first-class ...”

“... to Italo Calvino, is ‘a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’. I have read Sylvia by Leonard Michaels four or five times and I still don’t feel that I’ve got to the bottom of it. First published in 1992, it is a novel disguised as a memoir, or a memoir disguised as a novel, based on the ...”

“... helps us appreciate why such a way of reading seems appropriate. To relish this fully one needs to read the volume from cover to cover, experiencing the crossovers from language to language, poet to poet: a Post-Modern reading experience. As Watson points out, it seems likely, for instance, that Robert Fergusson and his Gaelic contemporary Duncan Ban Macintyre ...”

“... When The Well of Loneliness came out in July 1928 the reviewers were not astonished. Both Leonard Woolf and L.P. Hartley thought the book sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained’. It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye ...”

“... excitement keeps the narrative going, however unbalanced the judgments become. In fact, Keynes and Leonard Woolf, the only politically active members of Bloomsbury, were always very strongly anti-Communist, particularly Woolf, and that sinister upwards and downwards movement is a mere fever of fantasy, as those of us old enough to ...”

“... talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils ...”

“... sexual permutations would have caused no consternation among listeners who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. Nor, perhaps, would Forster’s own discomfort with the question of Sex, which played a large, complicated part in his own life: ‘You work it out,’ his essay goes on: ‘I can’t so well.’ Increasingly anguished by the ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”

“... on it for years. Adherents of a politics of language such as James Kelman and the poet Tom Leonard (actually the midwife of the Glasgow ‘renaissance’, though less frequently mentioned than his novelist colleagues) do not group together on exclusively nationalist lines: they see themselves as part of a school which has formed along the periphery of ...”

“... traces of itself behind? If Ruth hallucinated someone turning on the light, would she be able to read? If she hallucinated a conversation and left the tape-recorder running, would there be anything on the tape? If she hallucinated Schatzman and asked him questions, would ‘his’ answers be correct? No, was the answer in each case; any reasonably gifted ...”

“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... Mitz (1998), reissued this month by Soft Skull. This took as its jumping-off point the fact that Leonard Woolf once had a marmoset of that name, acquired from his friend Victor Rothschild in 1934. In the novel, Rothschild sees an ailing monkey chained up outside a junk shop, feels sorry for it, buys it and tries to pass it off as a gift for his pregnant ...”

“... writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s English’), in others again a privilege ...”

“... of that Harry Potter of the 1830s, Tom Brown; even harder to imagine anyone settling down to read them. (Thomas Hughes did in fact write a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, but it’s never done as well as Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it.) It’s a different matter for young Tom’s Voldemort, ‘that blackguard Flashman, who ...”

“... who don’t already know the book they came to shop for. If they pause and look, pick up and read, they may also buy. The product and the advertisement are bound up together. Berthold Wolpe’s 1950s Faber cover design for Le Corbusier’s ‘Modulor 2’ Two books are just out which chart the transition from essentially utilitarian, intermittently ...”