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“... as we emerged from our hobbit holes and combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, a sizeable, solidly ...”

“... is especially ironic, since he himself was a moralist in the most classical sense of the term. As Norman Geras has remarked, Marx believed in moral notions, but he did not know that he did. He did not know it because he wrongly identified morality with bourgeois moralism, which he quite rightly rejected. He was, in short, too respectful of his ...”

“... is the true architect of this warped vision. Here is a proper symbol for the corporate city, Blake’s Jerusalem reimagined by a committee determined to cover every cultural shift and marker. The giant’s compasses make their terrible calculations in the dirt of building works. In his prophetic poem, Europe, ...”

“... cheered. Jack Sweeney’s Irish wife said in amazement: ‘Why this is the only real American.’ Blake said there was no competition between great poets, and the mutual admiration of Bishop and Lowell was untouched by it. But with other contemporaries – Jarrell, Berryman, Roethke, as ambitious for fame as he was – the case was different. The opinions of ...”

“... to be exposed early to Greek or Latin, or even to their own language as it existed before the Norman Conquest, tend to find the notion of grammatical case baffling despite the survival in English of a genitive case (renamed possessive) and the distinction between subject and object pronouns in the first and third persons. Evidently, the alleged Irish ...”

“... wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn (whose membership of the CP Historians Group has gone unrecorded) wished to clobber that culture, and to show the way in which millenial Ranting led on to totalitarianism. So the old bugaboo was dug up and dressed in modern jeans. What is silly about ...”

“... a mystical vision of the world that could see eternity in a grain of sand. For him, as for Blake, everything that lived was holy. He argued that romantic love, the force of Eros, was consecrated, and that in the lover’s heightened sense of the beloved resides the divine. For writers eager to reconcile their Christian beliefs with an art committed to ...”

“... Europeans: Magritte, Dubuffet, Michaux, Bellmer, Klapheck. Britons: Bacon, Hamilton, Paolozzi, Blake, Harold Cohen, Riley, Caulfield, Gilbert and George. Kasmin’s Americans included Newman, Reinhardt, Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard ...”

“... of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government of the tongue’, was drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and ...”

“... poems, comic operas and humorous essays in the Ingletonian Raconteur. Revelling in the works of Blake, Ruskin and Samuel Palmer, he was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to confine him, he used school holidays to venture out. A ‘seasoned hitch-hiker’ by the age of 16, he visited the ...”

“... have led to the present. Onians hails the recent conversion to his own pro-scientific outlook of Norman Bryson, the art historian who in the 1980s launched the poststructuralist makeover of Anglophone art studies with Vision and Painting, a high-powered assault on Gombrich and his belief that pictures relate to ‘reality’. By 2001, Bryson was putting ...”

“... The night​ before the midterms, I reread The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. ‘Brood on that country who expresses our will,’ Mailer wrote:She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child – no one knows if legitimate – and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen ...”

“... explanation is that these suspiciously matching curves have a single cause. Already at work when Blake wrote about dark Satanic mills, it became more conspicuous when Elmer Drake struck oil and was thoroughly established by 1900, when one Englishman in ten was a coal-miner. The Industrial Revolution made a new civilisation, if we can call it that, sustained ...”

“... of parlance ‘Song, the Winds of Downhill’ works with a strange, disjointed syntax which, as Norman Finkelstein rightly observed in an essay on Primitive (1978), Oppen’s last book, ‘reflects the exact conditions of consciousness at the moment of composition’. This is not quite how it was with Discrete Series. Oppen had come far since the ...”