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“... innovative’ developments in Western visual culture, over a period starting with David’s politically-engaged works of the 1780s, and culminating in Cézanne’s ‘revolutionary’ but ‘apolitical’ modernism a century later. Very few of the artists or images discussed along the way would look out of place in the most conventional of ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... need is to have the already barely manageable ambiguities of Holy Writ compounded, as they are by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom. To be sure, this response will seem pusillanimous. When believers, Jewish or Christian, read or hear what they take to be Holy Writ, it’s supposed that they respond complacently. But some of them at least respond needfully and ...”

“... there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published. From the mid-Eighties mountainous illness surrounded Edward, from which he nonetheless retrieved the last big works: Customs in Common (1991), which traced a disappearing culture back over ground where ...”

“... his most radical opinions as old-buffer prejudices. ‘I am such an old academic that I agree with Blake and Shelley ... I think that the main points which have been found bad about Paradise Lost are precisely what made it so good, because they amount to a profound analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with the Christian God.’ Empson (like Eliot, like ...”

“... meanness, and if mentally thick, nonetheless a durable and somehow a reassuring presence.William Blake’s​ parents, like Gillray’s, belonged to the Moravian Church, and their early careers ran parallel in other ways. Blake’s first book, Poetical Sketches, came out in 1783, the same year as Gillray’s first major ...”

“... ears’. Jennings talked and talked, a great gush of words: about art, theatre and history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather ...”

“... Mansfield Park’s view of its own heroine. If we did not know that industrial imagery in William Blake’s work generally carries a negative charge, it would be harder to argue that the speaker of the ‘Tyger’ poem is not Blake himself, a point highly relevant to the work’s meaning. On the other hand, if we discovered ...”

“... fantasist Fuseli were at the height of their powers, and that embarrassing outsider William Blake was issuing book after book of illuminated prophecy. Farington himself was not a major participant in this rich flowering: his meticulous, straight-laced art belongs more to an earlier age. But he was a great observer. Although the diary has been known to ...”

“... during the Second World War Albanian campaign and describe soldiers, as Wilfred Owen or David Jones might, making their way to ‘the place where you don’t find weekdays or holidays, sick people or healthy people, poor or rich’. To possess a sunny disposition may be as much a handicap to a poet seeking approval in Britain as to come from a sunny ...”

“... not one joy but what some berk’llWant it ringed wi’ a red circle.That could be David Hockney moaning about the nanny state – and there’s a connection of sorts (both were born into working-class Yorkshire homes in 1937), as there is with Alan Bennett (born in Leeds in 1934). Harrison’s mode is more aggrieved than Bennett’s but the ...”

“... of vignettes: snapshots of various characters and their whereabouts between March and June 2021. Blake is a restaurateur who hides his true vocation from his family: he’s a hitman with an unconventional backstory (not a psychopath haunted by childhood trauma, just a guy who’s good at murder). Victor is a novelist for whom success is always just out of ...”

“... raised in Lambeth – Lambeth, ‘the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife’, according to William Blake – nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End. Patrick White says somewhere that there is an intangible difference in the air of places where there has been intense suffering, that you can never get rid of the memory that ...”

“... and a commentator on Wordsworth’s oeuvre in its best years, 1797-1805. Another British critic, David Pirie, writes in The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness from a point of view which often resembles Jonathan Wordsworth’s. Pirie’s book is less obviously biographical in its orientation, yet in the end its goal is a portrait of Wordsworth’s mind and ...”

“... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...”