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“... of Light starts and ends rollickingly, with fire in America and battle in Twenties Ireland. Ben Sheridan, an American just past boyhood, is called on to give a transfusion to his badly burned father. When the father dies as a result of mismatched blood, Ben discovers that he is not who he thinks he is. He returns to ...”

“... designed to infuriate experts and native speakers in equal measure. But whatever his subject – Ben Jonson’s plays and poems, Swinburne’s novels, the Marquis de Sade’s psychology, the mystery of Oscar Wilde, the American Indians, Haitian fiction, Russian poetry, Malraux’s theory of art – there isn’t an unclear or inelegant sentence, an ...”

“... But why does it follow that ateliers are the answer, or even an answer? ‘Both Pound and Wyndham Lewis were American or Americanised enough to have on the contrary a professional attitude to their respective arts, in the quite precise sense that they saw the continuity of art traditions ensured by the atelier, the master instructing his prentices. The ...”

“... pen portrait. He also had a suspicious, prickly nature and bore grudges for an eternity. After Lewis Carroll reported him to the dean of Christ Church for bunking off a maths lecture, Rosebery refused to read Alice in Wonderland for nearly thirty years. Of these traits too, he was well aware. In claiming (mendaciously?) never to have had the slightest ...”

“... intrusion by an 18th-century lyric into the UK top ten. ‘Lochaber no more/Sutherland no more/Lewis no more/Skye no more’, sang the Proclaimers, reprising the sentiment a few lines later as ‘Bathgate no more/Linwood no more/Methil no more/Irvine no more’. These were towns where big car plants and steel fabrication factories had recently shut down ...”

“... Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable elections. Of late, however, it has taken to sponsoring lectures and awarding grants ...”

“... in its bustle. She is 35, unmarried, lonely. Her father is dead, her mother is dying, her brother Ben is on his way to Japan (yes, that Pinkerton – Alice is the American counterpart of Puccini’s abandoned Madame Butterfly, a parallel study of injustice and hurt). Those who know Alice think of her as eccentric at best, perhaps seriously deranged. She is a ...”

“... left Derbyshire in 1958. She was now a qualified primary school teacher with a two-year-old son, Ben, from a failed marriage to Derek Westwood, a Mod who ran dance halls and bingo halls and later became an airline pilot. Westwood was handsome: ‘You have to be interesting-looking to capture my attention!’ He may have captured it, but he didn’t hold ...”

“... beautiful democratic Israel’ was revered by liberals, the New Statesman hero-worshipped Ben-Gurion as a model social democrat and the left barely knew that the Palestinians existed. That sentiment persisted until the 1967 war. Even two years after it, when the young Max Hastings visited Israel, he, like so many, was ‘thrilled by the brilliance of ...”

“... a gift Stead values. But there are more ways than one of writing poetry, and of being inspired; Ben Jonson wrote some good poems on the same plan, and a look at the early versions of Yeats’s Byzantium poems, or ‘arrangements’, should be enough to show that it can achieve quite striking results. Pound often made poems out of other people’s prose, but ...”

“... also the most telling, of the Republican speeches after the House reconvened was given by Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sasse, a self-described ‘history nerd’ who has a PhD from Yale, admitted that ‘it was ugly today’:But you know what? It turns out that when something is ugly talking about beauty isn’t just permissible, talking about beauty is ...”

“... movies of the past.’ It ends with an anthology with comments of the cigar in literature, from Ben Jonson to Stéphane Mallarmé. Tobacco-jar writing, like Norfolk-jacket writing, is a small perennial menace in what Mencken called beautiful letters (Mencken gets into Holy Smoke through a grandfather in the cigar trade) and usually produces what publishers ...”

“... of conflict. (The character of Ryman, Foden notes in an afterword, draws on the real-life Lewis Fry Richardson, a relation by marriage of Foden’s father-in-law.) Meadows is supposed to wheedle information about the number out of Ryman; but, by his own account an ‘inward, unreflexive creature’, he is singularly unqualified for the job. Foden ...”

“... to the Signet edition. And it must be this kind of central, classic writing that made C.S. Lewis, in his Oxford history of non-dramatic 16th-century literature, speak of the Sonnets as not just the world’s best love poems, but in some sense its only love poems. By ‘only’, Lewis was possibly thinking in terms of ...”

“... in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom’. Carmen bin Ladin, the ex-wife of Osama’s brother Yeslam, and Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s widow, have published memoirs to respectful reviews. Azar ...”