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“... On 18 June​ 1940 Charles de Gaulle, speaking from London, where he had arrived the previous day, denounced the new government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which had called for an armistice after the comprehensive defeat of France’s armed forces at the hands of the Wehrmacht. ‘Nothing is lost for France,’ he declared ...”

“... on which the gimmick announces itself as a thing. Ngai devotes a couple of incisive paragraphs to Charles Wright’s Harlem novel The Wig: A Mirror Image (1966), a delirious tall tale – ‘folkloric’, Wright called it – spun out of the protagonist’s fashioning of a new hairstyle which, he hopes, will render him racially ambiguous, and thus more ...”

“... they aren’t nearly so mysterious as one would think.’ Malinowski’s mentor at the LSE was Charles Gabriel Seligman, who studied the dreams of indigenous people in different parts of the empire, and gave Malinowski a copy of W.H.R. Rivers’s 1918 article ‘Dreams and Primitive Culture’ (‘for every feature and process of the dream I have found an ...”

“... being served. The Quarto text sounds like Stephen Rea, the modernised one like Gielgud or Prince Charles. The same or very similar modernised texts in Katherine Duncan-Jones’s scholarly and accessible new edition seem perfectly presentable on their own, but in Vendler are often destabilised by their immediate adjacency to the Quarto texts. Duncan-Jones ...”

“... of myth by forgotten streams … Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters?’ The passage is wonderfully facetious, but at the same time it manages momentarily to smuggle into this remorseless world, by the duplicity of a joke, just the sort of transcendent feelings evoked by Rossetti’s pictures.Reviewers were not slow to allocate Waugh’s ...”

“... This makes it a maddening book to read, and only someone who knows the biographies of Welles by Charles Higham, Simon Callow and others is likely to guess what Conrad is up to and why. Yet he is also writing criticism. Here the difference should matter between a line written as a writer writes and a line spoken as an actor reads. Even in a study like this ...”

“... heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. From childhood onwards, Eliot was fascinated not just by names in general, but by his own. Murder in the Cathedral, the 1935 play which, throughout the period covered by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income ...”

“... year Swift published an extract from McGahern’s unpublished first novel. It was spotted by Charles Monteith at Faber, who went on to oversee the publication of many of McGahern’s books. When Swift read the first part of another novel – to be called The Barracks – he wrote: ‘It’s a real advance. Very exciting. I still think the first book ...”

“... reality, brought to the heart of European cities or visited on Korea, Cambodia or Vietnam. In 1869 Charles Dilke wrote that ‘the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind,’ and with ghoulish eugenist fervour praised Anglo-Saxons as ‘the only extirpating race on earth’. Bombing was first thought of ...”

“... a man who manages to appear the supreme egotist, while seeking a kind of extinction of the ego. A passage in the unfinished novel Cécile – which recounts under the thinnest fictional veneer the story of Constant and Charlotte – is remarkably suggestive. The narrator and Cécile rendezvous at the Bal de l’Opéra where, both wearing masks, they stay till ...”

“... demand nothing further of the artist than a smile or a tear.’ According to Jane Mayo Roos, this passage shows ‘the degree to which the public came to the Salon to be amused, titillated, horrified and thrilled, much as they would seek some of the same pleasures at the café-concert.’ And why not? Why shouldn’t they expect successors to great early ...”

“... a handbag. His mother died in a home in Yorkshire in 1961, mentally deranged. Mrs Tynan quotes a passage of self-accusation, written years later, from his journals: ‘If she had come to London and lived with me in the Fifties, she could have been sustained by human contact ... I could have postponed her death at the expense of my own absorption in ...”

“... was another of the things affirmed, as Perry Anderson suggests when summarising an argument by Charles Jencks: In a society where information now mattered more than production, ‘there is no longer an artistic avant-garde’ since ‘there is no enemy to conquer’ in the global electronic network. In the emancipated conditions of today’s ...”

“... about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is sometimes assigned almost magical properties, or is credited with being a mysterious preservative for subject-matter which no longer interests. This is far from being absolutely true. Style alone cannot ...”

“... but also a historically-determined direction: that of the Soviet revolutionary struggle. The passage of time diminished the appropriateness of the original direction, and in 1932 Eisenstein, having out-stayed his leave of absence trying to make Que viva Mexico!, found disfavour in the eyes of Russia’s most powerful viewer, Stalin. This was a ...”