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“... series, the murders will cease. There is a difficulty here, however, illustrated by the story of Frank Kalman, a friend of Seldom’s who has for some time now been in a coma in hospital. It used to be Kalman’s job to set questions for school IQ tests: ‘He spent his whole life preparing logical series, of the most basic kind . . . given three symbols ...”

“... Williams, neither to be found in Gross, and Gross has his pets – Sherrington, for instance, and Thomas Szasz, unknown to Auden. The earlier book has a useful thematic index, Gross’s has not. Gross is more specific about his sources. Both classify their material under such headings as Humanity, Religion, Nature, Life, down to Young and Old, Sickness and ...”

“... for example-and her own work in Family Planning get adequate space. She is sometimes surprisingly frank about her failings; and her comments on the failings of some hotels and more or less identifiable restaurants, doctors and nurses are equally frank and usually entertaining. Wives may, as in this book, be a little too ...”

“... Amy is that she is herself a fantasist, and that she imagines herself to be none other than Anne Frank (in the interlocking fashion of the novel, Anne Frank has earlier been extolled by Nathan’s father as the ideal Jewish author). The reader is extraordinarily disconcerted when the narrative returns to the real Amy the ...”

“... Then, in Mansfield Park, these words start being used in a new way. The stiff pater familias, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from Antigua to find that his niece Fanny has progressed from ugly duckling to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford – rich, elegant, every inch a gentleman – is ...”

“... Anderson explored the idea of a character challenging the notion of reality as others conceive it: Frank Machin in This Sporting Life (1963) tries (and ultimately fails) to wrest control of his destiny from the forces of the establishment. At one point, in the dressing-room after a rugby match, Machin has a hosepipe turned on him as a joke. His immediate ...”

“... a strong line over questions of definition and evaluation; and each contains much to applaud. Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book goes right back to the beginning, to a rath in front of an oak wood singled out for comment by some anonymous poet of the sixth century, and cherished as a survival from an even more distant past, while the Faber book takes as ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... The post-Resurrection events were uncanny (persons vanishing through solid doors, the behaviour of Thomas and so on), but whoever originally told these stories believed them in quite a different sense from the way their authors believed the infancy stories, or the way they strike a modern historian. What must be his reaction when he contemplates the ...”

“... to a high military officer of a Warsaw Pact country, then watch it.’ On 31 May 1944, Major Frank Thompson, wearing the British uniform that should have protected him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His bearing throughout ...”

“... the Immortality Ode. The treatment of Coleridge is more persuasive and benefits from the work of Thomas MacFarland. Coleridge also wrote a lot but he was certainly blocked. Biographia Literaria is an almost comic instance of the desperate – and successful – tactics he would adopt to avoid writing what he thought it was his duty to write. It could also ...”

“... he thinks of himself as Ebenezer Scrooge, not because Money is All, but because Art is All. He, Thomas Lucchesi, the Scrooge of Art, who hoards himself to writing. He gives so little to others, he gives nothing, who would now reclaim his past with words. Speaks again: ‘Lucchesi weeps for Lucchesi. True. Too easily true. But true.’ [Takes a note.] For ...”

“... kind proper to an artist. In The Golden Notebook and elsewhere, she mentions her admiration for Thomas Mann and for the idea of the philosophical novel, now, she believes, an impossibility; but even so she thinks one can still claim to be serious. Her right to make that claim is supported by her permanent interest in the world’s wickedness and ...”

“... at his country’s methods was so great that he broke off relations with former friends (like Thomas Mann) and even his current lover, who championed the sinking. Others were moved to fisticuffs. The social-critical novelist Leonhard Frank overheard a socialist journalist proclaim in a posh Berlin café that the ...”

“... classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas Gataker who refused a Cambridge doctorate because ‘like Cato the censor he would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was ...”