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“... an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and unpleasant business and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like to know, by visible marks and with some precision, how far ...”

“... examples, just as we are invited to describe our own idea of Eden. Again, in another very funny passage Auden evokes four kinds of critic he hopes a poet might not turn into: ‘a prig, a critic’s critic, a romantic novelist or a maniac’. The first is a person ‘for whom no actual poem is good enough’; the second manages ‘to deprive someone who has ...”

“... another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew ...”

“... anonymous consumers of pornography, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Correggio’s Loves were given to Charles V by Federico Gonzaga; Perino’s tapestries were woven for his visit to Genoa, and the gallery of Francis I was hurriedly completed for Charles’s visit in 1539. To a remarkable degree the audience for all these ...”

“... luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally cynical. It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’This is ...”

“... would suffice (the tunic Mary wore at the annunciation is preserved at Chartres). In 1267, Charles II, count of Provence, dug up the bones in Vézelay that local tradition held were Mary Magdalene’s and took the left foot to St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume; thirteen years later he dug them up again and this time found a piece of ‘living skin’ – said ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hucksterism and fewer footnotes. You can take the temperature of the writing from the very opening passage, where it is stated that ‘We have placed men on the moon, yet ... ’ In my experience, this is the unvarying prelude to a mass of dissociated generalisations and complaints, of the country-dogsward variety. Gingrich affects to believe that the country ...”

“... is extremely tactile, its touchingness embodied in touch, its feelings felt in the fingers. The passage work in the recapitulation of the first movement of the A minor Piano Sonata (K.410), for example, describes an expressive contour which the hand that plays it brings into being, as though the hand were singing, as though the exquisite dissolutions of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was: not only solitary reproduction but self-regeneration. Among the highest forms of life – Charles I, say, or Louis XVI – to cut in two is to kill; but to divide the LCS in two is to stimulate a process of infinite growth, ‘unbounded extension’, apparent immortality. Alongside this representation of the Society as unbounded, however, there is ...”

“... OED gives ‘incision, cut, score or gash’ as the first meaning for ‘scotch’, and cites this passage. Powell also notes that Sonnets 74, 77 and 82 indicate that ‘the Young Man was a reviewer.’ The indicative phases are: ‘When thou reviewest this, thou dost review/The very part was consecrate to thee’; ‘The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... being in the mouths of so many: the Earl of Bothwell abused her body at his pleasure, having passage in at the back door.’ Mary’s enemies, the Confederate Lords, also issued a ballad, accusing Mary and Bothwell of the ‘beastly buggery Sodom has not seen’.Mary was not a fanatic; unlike her uncles or her namesake in the South, she had no interest ...”