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“... By now, his first marriage had come apart and he was living with the young English sculptor Daphne Hardy. She was to be his companion through much of the terrifying episode in his life described in Scum of the Earth: internment as a dangerous alien in the camp of Le Vernet in the French Pyrenees, flight from the advancing Germans through a disintegrating ...”

“... biographies of novelists, and at his best when reviewing poetry. His essays on Sterne, Austen, Hardy, Trollope, Dickens, George Eliot and others begin incisively and then drift sideways, as critical argument is forsaken for biographical chatter and a widespread sowing of the field with puffed wheat. There is always a remarkably serene sense of what an ...”

“... a patient invests, the harder it is for her to cut her losses and walk away. As the sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman has noted, infertility, formerly an act of God or fate, now looks deceptively like a choice, a perverse refusal of medical help. How much of May’s account is particular to America? The lack of comparison with other countries is ...”

“... with its complex rituals of amour propre. One consequence is that Ruth Fainlight’s poems, like Barbara Pym’s novels, are not a bit afraid of feeling, or of not handling it the right way. Poems in the present collection like ‘The Circle’ – an old friend turns back to fairy stories and goes mad – and ‘Judgment at Marble Arch’ succeed as poems ...”

“... on the subject of female sexuality. But by reading his texts deconstructively, by teasing out (in Barbara Johnson’s phrase) their ‘warring forces of signification’, Mitchell can demonstrate a conflict in Freud between the crudely reductive, biological account of sexual difference and a theory that opens into questions of gender politics. This can all be ...”

“... little to offer but smudged photos of the dead on commemorative mugs: Freddie Mercury, Laurel and Hardy, Princess Di. ‘Small dolls £1.99.’ The afterburn of celebrity as a memorial ashtray. Greenwich is deeply ambivalent about the whole Millennium Experience scam. Most of the place – the area around the Cutty Sark, phase one of the Dreadnought Library ...”