Search Results

“... letter from 1935 to a friend from university days, Tom McGreevy, Beckett quoted some phrases from Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ that ‘seemed to be made for me and which I have never forgotten’. The first was: ‘He that can well suffer shall find most peace.’ The letter to McGreevy is in the first volume, which gives us glimpses of the ...”

“... With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre: Thomas Mann in the convoluted, partly essayistic prose of his novels, Bert Brecht in the drama and narrative poetry of social dialectics, Benn in the lyrical poetry of radical Modernism ...”

“... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... right from the days of myth. Then they parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again – in the novel. Why in the novel? ‘You may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter ...”

“... that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus. In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne and Coleridge from literary shoplifters into masters of bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American ...”

“... while another Hals painting, The Singing Boys (c.1623-27), adorns the companion volume, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly ...”

“... OTHERS. A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A SILLY DROOLING YOUNG SPERMICIDE. (‘Eh?’) A SILLY DROOLING YOUNG SPERMICIDE. (‘Oh.’) On the matter of the promising young Ross, Larkin was a touch more circumspect. In 1941, he wrote (though not to Amis): Alan Ross has published a book of poems as well. I haven’t seen them yet, but I ...”

“... degrees of debt, direct or indirect, to other writers. For example, he was a lifelong admirer of E.B. White and his correspondence indefatigably quotes White’s colourful definition of a miracle: ‘blue snow on a red barn’. In Lolita, Humbert speaks of ‘our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow’. Of course, Nabokov was abnormally sensitive to ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”

“... and editors. Other leading figures also do both, including, in this country, Christopher Ricks and John Carey. But most critics in good repute don’t seem to want to edit, and wouldn’t be any good if they tried. The provocative element in McGann’s position for them will be his serious belief in the centrality of the role of the editor. He goes ...”

“... increasing weight; to his immense satisfaction he found that in the later stages of his obesity St Thomas Aquinas had had a semicircular piece taken out of an altar so he could continue to say mass, but in the winter of 1915 he dieted strictly and listened to his wife play the piano with greater attention. When the Italians declared war and advanced on the ...”

“... each case. Taped interviews with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography or ...”

“... to happen, we might as well enjoy them when they do. (Basically, it’s the argument advanced by Thomas DeQuincey in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.) Football used to take a similar approach. When Frank Rijkaard spat at Rudi Völler in 1990, we were showed the flying lump of gob in slow motion from about ten different angles. But this ...”

“... who read it in 1946 when it was first published – contains a piece of description borrowed from Thomas Mann’s novella ‘Tonio Kröger’. Other poems work over passages of Melville, Jonathan Edwards, Cobbett, Thiebault and others. A good many of the autobiographical poems in Life Studies are cannibalised from Lowell’s 1950s prose memoir, fragments of ...”