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“... Genet, Lampedusa (and also Visconti’s film of The Leopard), Britten’s Death in Venice (and Thomas Mann’s novella): all cases in which it is easy enough for interpreters to discover or insert some version of lateness. There is nothing mechanical or obvious about these studies, which buzz with excitement and intelligence and demonstrate what his ...”

“... In perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing ...”

“... which are neither those of traditional literary history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The ...”

“... The idea that Eliot’s poetry was rooted in private aspects of his life has now been accepted,’ says Lyndall Gordon in the Foreword to her second volume of biographical rooting among these aspects. This acceptance, which she evidently approves, has undoubtedly occurred, as a root through the enormous heap of books about the poet, now augmented by the centenary of his birth, will quickly demonstrate ...”

“... Frank Field has been Birkenhead’s MP since 1979. He was, for the first year of Blair’s Administration, the Minister for Welfare Reform in Harriet Harman’s DSS. Harman and Field didn’t get on very well, and both were anyway sacked after 15 months. Not being a minister has given the former Young Conservative more time for writing ...”

“... appearance of the risen Lord to a company of apostles; but John alone has the story of doubting Thomas, surely a strong apologetic fiction designed to demonstrate that the entire body, wounds and all, has been resurrected. At some point, either in the evening of Easter Sunday or forty days later, having forewarned the apostles of the visitations that are to ...”

“... a hundred-odd to Galsworthy, the same quantity to Ford Madox Ford, ‘several dozen’ to Thomas Wise, an unspecified but obviously vast number to the agent Pinker, and so on. Moreover, the core collection of Jean-Aubry is unreliable, because of ‘unprofessional editing and omissions’, the latter caused by an understandable desire not to give ...”

“... followed suit. Apocryphal gospels are quite rich in additional stories about Pilate, Doubting Thomas and Judas. Judas Iscariot is in some ways an odd presence both in the Bible story and the Apocrypha. The earliest New Testament reference to the betrayal of Christ was the work of Paul in 1 Corinthians 11.23-26, a letter written a generation or so before ...”

“... as cultural artefacts, we shall recognise that everything is, in the end, inescapably political. Frank Lentricchia, in his Afterword, undertakes to demonstrate that Wallace Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of a Jar’, probably chosen for its apparent remoteness from politics, ‘sharpens our awareness of the structure of power’; and in principle there is no poem ...”

“... power and cultural philanthropy, fed by oil revenues, set against backdrops provided by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas or Jean Nouvel. Though Rykwert mentions none of these architects by name, their work plainly lies behind his guiding assumption that the ‘privatisation’ of political and financial power in modern times has led to a wave ...”

“... out all dirty matter from inside your stomach . . . by having a "rear” daily’. A remarkably frank passage on the perils of self-abuse – ‘you all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling in your private parts’ – was left out of the original edition on the insistence of the publisher, much to the disappointment of Baden-Powell’s ...”

“... schoolfellows make allowances for him. Aitken, in the Hughes novel, complains about the travesty Frank Richards made of his character – obese he may have been, obtuse never. There’s the History Prize he won in 1910 to testify to his possession of actual brains in place of the low cunning ascribed to Bunter. It may also be meant to remind us of Aitken’s ...”

“... Thanks to​ the work of Norman Cohn, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Keith Thomas and others, we have, over the past few years, acquired a lot of information about millenarianism as a social and historical force. The belief that the end is nigh, or that a new series of times is about to begin, is very ancient, but it is also modern ...”

“... prose. For learned disputes had gentlemanly antecedents, and so had learned fabrications; even Thomas Warton was guilty, and he was the author of the standard History of English Poetry, a work some Shakespeare hunters saw as a model for their much desired history of English drama. The deceits practised by the 19th-century forgers were more ...”

“... much time: indeed he had almost none for any older modern English composer except his teacher Frank Bridge. They all represented a taste he did not want to acquire. And it struck me that behind the critic’s detection of a link with Elgar there was the vestige of an old desire – that Britten, though he was certainly allowed to admire Berg, should ...”