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“... and momentous events is a familiar move in Boyd’s fiction. In The New Confessions (1987), John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker, fights in the trenches, is pauperised by the Wall Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just ...”

“... figures who recreated modern writing were gay, or Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy. But he would have been slightly unsettled, I think, by the thought of the gay element in this list, and by ...”

“... without pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion in his charming art.’ So Henry James summed up the career of his great predecessor in his Hawthorne of 1879. James was usually a shrewd critic, but ‘charming’ is hardly the adjective that first leaps to mind when the modern reader confronts ...”

“... I was stoned out of my mind. Back in the room, my father was absorbed in an article about Henry James. I discovered that the shower emitted hot water. It felt like divine intervention. I’ve no idea how long I spent under the nozzle, transfixed by the warm rush. When I emerged, the room was four inches deep in steaming water. The drain was blocked, but my ...”

“... It has the structural intricacy of the traditional ‘dynasty’ novel, of a Galsworthy or Thomas Mann, but treats all that in the sportive, coldly demystified style of the contemporary. One minor incident in the book exemplifies the thin line it treads between signifier and signified. Owen has been writing a review of a fashionable leftist novelist whom he ...”

“... because he thought it would sell. It did: there were 23 editions between 1481 and 1700. Now James Simpson, a medievalist at Harvard, has translated Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox into colloquial modern English. The book opens with the lion, the king of the beasts, calling the animals to court to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. The first thing ...”

“... in February 1915. She didn’t have a visa and Reilly was in danger of being prosecuted under the Mann Act on suspicion of white slavery, but the police agreed not to charge him if they got married. The marriage seems to have been largely one of (in)convenience: Reilly had a ‘string of affairs’ with a series of dancers and actresses.Morris’s principal ...”

“... and critics. C.H. Sisson called her ‘in her sobriety … the most naked of poets’, and Rachel Mann’s introduction to this new selection adds that she writes in a ‘tantalising confessional mode’, but no one has ever been certain what life the poems were exposing. She had a happy childhood, by all accounts, but the onset of blindness and increasing ...”

“... Venice (Consul Smith, who promoted the careers of Canaletto and other artists), Florence (Horace Mann, whose letters to Horace Walpole are famous) and Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to ...”

“... the appearance of Animal Farm in the previous year, and publication of his essays on nationalism, James Burnham, and the totalitarian approach to literature, in the short-lived but influential magazine Polemic. This is not just nit-picking. That first appreciation of Orwell as an important writer and original thinker was a socio-literary one, and so was the ...”

“... The Archers. The self-awareness of the novel in regard to its public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the discerning connoisseur to those who were getting ...”

“... sibylline quotations – from Sophocles, Coleridge, Mallarmé, Wordsworth, Kafka, Goethe, Valéry, Mann, Gide, Joyce), and starts with a lengthy re-creation of ‘The Polish Years’. Karl brings together a good deal of useful historical background here, emphasising what we, indeed, knew, and Conrad was hardly likely to forget: that Poland was ruthlessly ...”

“... 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 injustice, which ...”

“... The photographer​ Sally Mann tells a story about being at a dinner party with Cy Twombly – the two were friends from their hometown of Lexington, Virginia. ‘He was writing directions for somebody – how to get to the antique mall or something – and he wrote them and the guy said, “Oh yes, I know where that is,” and they left them on the table, and I swear to god – like Wagnerian harpies out of the rafters these people came swooping down on this little scrap of paper!’ The rapacious guests might have done the same for any famous artist (despite early obscurity, by the end of his life Twombly was being called ‘the most important living artist’) but the idea of a Twombly napkin has a sort of genius to it: so many of his surfaces, painted white or bare material, are repositories of scribbles, dribbles and smears, scrawled with lists and doodles and diagrams, written on then crossed out or rubbed out leaving only messy traces ...”

“... breathes something of that ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ which seemed to Henry James ‘the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend’. Unfortunately, that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose claim to ...”