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“... of envelopes. Books bought in Cambridge from the libraries of Raymond Williams, Dadie Rylands, Tony Tanner, Jack Lindsay and other luminaries. Even the most unassuming books prompted recollections. They composed a sort of biography, each one acting like a door in an advent calendar, opening on to some moment in the past.Still, they had to go. From a ...”

“... superiority to Trimalchio. This ‘Whiggish’ judgment has many adherents, among them the late Tony Tanner, in an essay on Gatsby in The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. For Tanner, perhaps the most distinguished of British ‘Americanists’, Fitzgerald’s revisions are ‘almost ...”

“... English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen Heath and Stephen Bann. Samuel Johnson had moral principles, but nothing like a theory of literature: he didn’t need one. The force of English common sense is that it leaves you free to deal with the things that ...”

“... pool’; ‘You cannot guess the weed I hold,/Clara Green, Acapulco Gold.’ (In a letter to Tony Tanner from May 1968, he wrote: ‘I have a lot of the best ever grass – it is known as Acapulco Gold and is $15 a lid, it is that good.’) He was always interested in the body and the bodiless, or of the body transforming, being taken over by ...”

“... adultery’, but all his ideas on this subject owe a large (acknowledged) ‘creative debt’ to Tony Tanner (who was Cash’s supervisor at Cambridge). He reveals himself as a pretty poor close-reader in an anecdote about meeting Greene. He subsequently sent the novelist a short story he’d written (‘about an adulterous summer holiday affair that ...”

“... the problems. The book is structured by protruding absences, like negative flying buttresses. Tony Tanner in his Prefaces to Shakespeare refers to the ‘ripples of ontological unease’ produced by Hamlet’s staging of The Mousetrap, but there are also uneasy ripples when we’re confronted not by a play-within-a-play but a ...”

“... one of his ‘favourite books’. These are paradigmatic works about characters who are left out. Tony Tanner once asserted that all novels are about adultery. More fundamentally, we may wonder what literature there is that is not about exclusion. And if all literature is about exclusion, the question is why?It is true​ of both Hamlet and Milton’s ...”

“... biographer Claire Tomalin sees Mrs Norris as ‘one of the great villains of literature’; Tony Tanner thought she was ‘one of Jane Austen’s most impressive creations and indeed one of the most plausibly odious characters in fiction’. All this is clear, at times rather too clear. What is not clear is what the reader should feel about the ...”

“... Understand’. The whole beauty of the thing is that we can’t know for sure what Maisie knows. Tony Tanner has said that ‘in a sense the book hinges on what Maisie does not know’ – especially what she doesn’t know about sex. But by the same token she can, as Tanner also suggests, deeply know all kinds of ...”

“... sensibility’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Martin Amis’s Success, Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel, Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical ...”

“... The cunts who lieth’ere wor unemployed? This lot worked at one job all life through. Byron, ‘Tanner’, ‘Lieth ’ere interred’ They’ll chisel fucking poet when they do you and that, yer cunt, ’s a crude four-letter word. ‘Listen, cunt!’ I said, ‘before you start your jeering the reason why I want this in a book ’s to give ungrateful ...”

“... against the old-style collected edition. On the dustjacket of this (and previous) volumes is Tony Tanner’s compliment: ‘These letters are impeccably edited and presented . . . To anyone interested in the history of fiction writing, or the emergence of Modernism, they are indispensable.’ If they are indispensable shouldn’t the letters appear ...”

“... that world as a now fragmented and perhaps never really tenable historical fantasy. Writing of Tony Tanner’s intricate study of adultery in the novel (‘there is hardly a page that lacks some original and enriching perception’), he worries about whether critical works like this ‘will ever make much contribution to the common wisdom’. ‘We ...”

“... perspectives between the narrator and Beatriz shimmers like light on shot silk.Coetzee’s​ 1997 Tanner Lectures at Princeton provoked an expected and not unsatisfying quantum of academic murmuring. Instead of conventional lectures, he read out two stories about Elizabeth Costello, who, invited by an American liberal arts college to lecture on ...”