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“... for a people to write about itself can be both inspiration and good business. It certainly was for Isaac Bashevis Singer. His incomparable sense of Polish Jewry, the Yiddishness in which he was brought up, renders itself to the reader as if in the palpable form of experience: the words seem to sit us down and bring us beer and brandy with a side order of ...”

“... The life of Isaac Newton falls into two halves, and the main problem for Newton studies is how to fit them together. In the first half he was a sulky Cambridge mathematician who, at the age of 44, astonished the world with a work of natural science that was soon recognised as one of the greatest books ever written ...”

“... been to become a poet. He did some literary writing: a creole version of King Lear, a Henry James-Isaac Babel hybrid and an epic a bit like Lord Jim, but was unable ‘to find my own voice’. ‘I didn’t really get the deep structures of Englishness … its reservations, ironies and ambiguities, its silences and evasions. I didn’t understand how the ...”

“... when that authority seems to speak with the voice of God. It wasn’t just a theological matter. Isaac’s binding by his obscene and irrational father, Abraham, could be taken as an analogy for the state of self-imposed tutelage Kant wanted society to escape. Prudently, the Prussian royal censor banned him from writing about religion again.Kant wasn’t the ...”

“... isn’t yet able to realise. Borges’s short fiction is teeming with them. In ‘The Library of Babel’, Borges imagines a library ‘composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries’. The library is ‘total’: it contains books composed of ‘all possible combinations’ of letters: ‘All that is able to be expressed, in ...”

“... God, we say, for the devil. O’Connor’s stories are neither as brief nor as lyrical as many of Isaac Babel’s are, but they have as much concentrated time in them, and both writers press their readers towards responses as complex as the stories themselves are. With Babel, an immeasurably greater writer, she shared ...”

“... Conjunctions ran a series of reproductions of pages from a pocket diary that had belonged to Isaac Bashevis Singer. In capital letters, Singer – who emigrated from Poland to America in 1935 – filled page after page with lists of words: 15 JULY: SILT, IMPINGE, OVERLAP, WIREPULLER. 24 JULY: DOCILITY, CEREBRATIONS, INSIDIOUS, AFTERMATH. 29 ...”

“... in 1774 that God created racial differences when he scattered the peoples who built the Tower of Babel. A more venerable and influential rationale was drawn from the ninth book of Genesis. As the floodwaters around Mount Ararat were receding, Noah whiled away an afternoon drinking wine from his vineyard. After resolving to sleep off his stupor, he was ...”