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“... Smollett can often have been rated an enemy in the new age. ‘I want Smollet’s works,’ wrote Robert Burns, ‘for the sake of his incomparable humor.’1 And he may also have wanted them for their romantic intervals. Smollett was, in fact, to imitate the inimitable Cervantes for the rest of his life. He translated him, then re-translated him in a ...”

“... as Siegfried’s Funeral March gives way to the more comfortable strains of the village band, the medley of the two just about summing it up.Back in 1939, Auden is typically bold, not to say boastful about his affair. Even nowadays, with parents the stunned and submissive onlookers at their children’s lives, a middle-aged man would think twice about meeting ...”

“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... the ensuing short circuit with Isaiah’s ‘angel-coal’. The narrative dissolves into a medley of voices: Yiddish-speaking card players, Irish workmen, a sailor dreaming of fish and chips, an agitator speaking of ‘the day when the red cock crows’. Jewish and Christian religious motifs and bursts of sexual imagery flicker over the scene as David ...”

“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”

“... In Wordsworth, too, Leavis associates a ‘vital equivocalness’ with creativity. Being a medley of public lectures from the final eight years of Leavis’s life, to which some early pieces from Scrutiny are added (the attack on Joyce is of special interest), the essays contain few surprises. Dismissive judgments and complex evaluations mingle. Milton ...”

“... had shrunk to the darkened upstairs room in 50 Wimpole Street from which she would elope with Robert Browning. Her letters to him allude to the ‘blind hopes’ for the future that Prometheus speaks of in Aeschylus. She hoped to escape her isolation, not just to marry, but to realise her creative potential. She did not want to be crushed by a falling ...”

“... against something spurious and sophisticated. That dig at Spender, for instance, draws on a rich medley of antipathies that Carey inherited from Orwell – the literary, the affluent, the arty, the expensively educated, the feckless, the undeservedly rewarded – and which have always animated his most feisty writing. Poetry is on his side, it turns ...”