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“... in this volume to the likes of Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, but only a single passing mention of Beckett (who had his own concept of inner space), and nothing at all about contemporaries such as Harold Pinter, Christine Brooke-Rose or B.S. Johnson. (Johnson does make a brief appearance in Miracles of Life, where he’s described as ‘a thoroughly unpleasant ...”

“... J.G. Lockhart, John Wilson, Walter Scott, William Maginn, Allan Cunningham, William Blackwood, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn – are evoked, not as ciphers for their works but as bullish personalities. What Miller values most in Hogg’s fiction – its ‘intentness on a real, visible, palpable, smellable Scotland’ – is triumphantly exhibited in ...”

“... Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set ...”

“... castration. Those statuettes brood, as tutelary deities, over the two most substantial essays: Francis Huxley’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, Hugh Lloyd-Jones on ‘The Study of the Ancient World’. Doubtless Huxley will hate being called ‘substantial’: his style is busily flash. But he packs in more information, line by line, than any ...”

“... as six weeks ago, the answer would have been yes, definitely. ‘British politics,’ Andy Beckett wrote in the Guardian last October, ‘feels relentlessly tabloid-dominated. From the daily obsession with immigrants to the rubbishing of human rights lawyers, from the march towards a “hard Brexit” to the smearing of liberal Britons as bad losers ...”

“... stopped in Egypt to see the sights and was observed to gaze for a long time at the Sphinx: ‘Francis Worsley commented that she probably couldn’t make head nor tail of him.’ MacNeice’s problem, in the words of his BBC colleague Jack Dillon, was that he was an introvert trying to be an extrovert. He badly needed to feel he belonged to a group, and ...”

“... the only new recruit made in the 20th century to the first rank of Old Masters was (as the late Francis Haskell pointed out) Georges de La Tour, whose brilliantly lit pickpocket and solemn, candlelit Magdalen both derive from Caravaggio’s inventions. The reassessment of Caravaggio was in part due to the advent of loan exhibitions, to the cleaning and ...”

“... back wards, who had to be managed as best they could.‘Any fool can turn the blind eye,’ Samuel Beckett says in Murphy (1938), a novel set in part in the Bethlem Royal Hospital near Croydon. The hospital had recently transferred to an airy new site in Beckenham when Beckett’s friend Geoffrey Thompson got a job there as ...”

“... pride. As the Irish nation wallowed in its ‘liberation’, a Jesuit priest called Father Francis Shaw submitted an essay to the Jesuit journal Studies which contained what Roy Foster calls a ‘swingeing exposé of lacunae in [Patrick] Pearse’s ideology’. The piece was not published for six years. The editors felt that Ireland was not ready for a ...”

“... after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were anti-social, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness. The problem for ...”

“... inaugurates a long tradition in modern writing (Arnold, Eliot, Stevens, Beckett, Larkin) that finds a way through to imagination by describing imagination’s failure. The fallout for Southey was less fruitful, though it was to affect his subsequent reputation just as much. When the Edinburgh Review began in 1802, the editors needed ...”

“... stop a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the ...”

“... burning in the name of the Holy Ghost. Joyously, the Franciscan Monastery blazed in the name of St Francis, who had loved fire and sung hymns to it. Our Lady Street burned for Father and Son at once. Needless to say the Lumber Market, Coal Market and Haymarket burned to the ground. In Baker Street the ovens burned, and the bread and rolls with them. In Milk ...”

“... up a good fight. It’s not surprising to learn that Hughes especially admired the paintings of Francis Bacon, with their spattered bodies twisting about and screaming defiantly despite their homely prisons. As one of Hughes’s poems has it, ‘Life is Trying to be Life’; but then, as the poem continues, ‘Death also is trying to be life.’ Who will ...”

“... done with her? At the end of the mangy, scrambling movie decade that gave us Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, there was nary a murmur from her (just imagine what she might have made of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). We know from Nunez and others that Sontag boogied in Studio 54, and yet where was her disco ...”