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“... we have identified it as the re-humanising activity, so when it becomes technical or claims a field of its own – when criticism says, ‘Let us be like other departments of knowledge’ – it seems not only to mistake but even to betray its nature. Criticism, in any case, is no longer what it was; and Christopher Norris’s compact book on ...”

“... why Austen readers could find her thoroughly disturbing. Jane Austen and her contemporaries had a frank curiosity about one another’s personalities and lives which often at the time came under fire as vulgar prying. A passion for gossip at all levels made the early 19th century an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking ...”

“... Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of Peterborough, is also alive to the openings offered by high-handed Tory reform in local government and the ...”

“... customs with which they deal, derives from Binchy’s long essay and the other labourers in his field to whom he refers, as far back as that almost legendary figure Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who in virtual solitude composed or induced in 1853, unaided, out of his vast erudition, the first-ever grammar of a tongue one word of which he had never heard spoken and ...”

“... novelist, and so lavish in the employment of his gifts, that his occasional ventures into the field of poetry have in the past tended to be rather disappointing. The miraculous exuberance of his prose, seemingly so inexhaustible in its gathering of perceptions and engendering of conceits, might have led one to hope that his verse would display something ...”

“... and spending four years in the Philippines working for MacArthur, who had a retirement job as Field-Marshal of the tin-pot Philippine Army. When Eisenhower was no longer his golden boy, MacArthur termed him ‘a good clerk, nothing more’. Pearl Harbour brought Eisenhower directly under another Chief of Staff, George Marshall, who immediately sent for ...”

“... of Paul Roazen’s two books about Freud’s less than saintly relations with his followers, or of Frank Sulloway’s exhaustive book about Freud’s reliance on the vulnerable biology and ‘sexology’ of the late 19th century. The more we learn about Freud’s actual grounding in his age, the less possible it will be to sustain the Promethean myth of his ...”

“... because the pleasure produced by the free play of the imagination is intrinsically subversive. As Frank Sinatra puts it, ‘Imagination is silly, it goes around willy-nilly.’ For Steiner, it is the willy-nilliness of imagination that makes it dangerous, and our readiness to indulge that willy-nilliness that makes art matter. Steiner believes, to use an ...”

“... of work were a new existential value. David Storey may have been, even in a heavily contested field, the most inhibited British writer of his generation. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Wakefield, in a family that felt work was destiny and everything else was showing off. His father worked in a coal mine but Storey, while being paid to play rugby ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short ...”

“... to Whitney Balliett, ‘happens when your phrasing hardens’.Coleman made his career in ‘the field of music the white man calls jazz’, but his war on cliché extended far beyond it. He composed dissonant European art music for string quartet; played jagged electric funk with a band he called Prime Time (an important influence on the New York punk ...”

“... rapport between actors that animates such classics of the genre as It Happened One Night (Frank Capra was Cassavetes’s favourite director) or The Awful Truth or Bringing Up Baby. Part of the fun of those movies comes from the sense they give that the actors themselves are having fun. An actor having fun with a part, playfully embroidering it, opens ...”

“... Ussher settled the controversy in 1650 with an authoritative proposal of 4004 BC. This was the field in which Newton hoped to make his last great contribution to human knowledge. He accepted Ussher’s chronology, but wanted to extend it from the Jews to the Gentile nations. Greek and Roman history had never been satisfactorily synchronised with the ...”

“... a picture show,’ she says, ‘I feel like the norm’; ‘I’m wide open, I’m frank, there’s nothing on my mind besides what I say.’ Like Mrs Copperfield’s, Harriet’s isn’t a real voyage out: she thinks of Camp Cataract as a ‘tree house’, a safe place where she can build up habits and roots as she would at home. Sadie is ...”

“... scholars some distance from the day to day concerns of those who actually toil in the literary field. And ‘genre’ – a staple of literary analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in exploding or eluding it. Magazines, then, make for a nice object of study: still recognisable to both ...”