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“... was becoming more and more a bleak and burdensome formality. Emma, alone much of the time at Max Gate, a house that she disliked, had grown fat and peculiar; she had come to disapprove of her husband’s literary career, and she was no longer eager to share the social life that went with it. This clearly suited Hardy, who spent as much time as he could ...”

“... have written more books on his feet than any man before or since. And he was marvellous to behold. Black cape, black hat, black face, and piercing, ferocious black eyes. Toulouse-Lautrec admixed with Aubrey Beardsley out of Edvard Munch. It was Romain ...”

“... Body and Soul (1925), with a new jazz score performed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. (Max Roach has composed music for another Micheaux silent, The Symbol of the Unconquered.) There are now the two books and at least two more are on the way. There is, as yet, no Micheaux biography, although his story is compelling. His parents were born in slavery ...”

“... time I had looked at it since then. David had sent it to me in a large box, the book wrapped in a black kitchen rug covered with wax drippings, as if someone had done a voodoo spell over it. It arrived the week after a marathon counselling session where the counsellor had said: ‘He just can’t do it. He just can’t give you what you want.’ I wanted ...”

“... Yet all that turns up in these seven volumes is a single three-line postcard. Probably the famous Max Gate bonfires consumed the rest. These collected letters constitute, therefore, a text quite different from that of a novel or an autobiography, even though they may offer some of the same satisfactions. They are less a Greek urn than a heap of shards. All we ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”

“... it may in the end be preferable to render Akhmatova in a plain prose version. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, however, are highly experienced translators, sympathetic alike to Russian and English requirements. One of her most memorable poems, ‘Lot’s Wife’, four quatrains composed between 1922 and 1924, illustrates the virtues of her poetry: the way ...”

“... thought of him as a politician who had wandered into newspaper management. At the pre-Conrad Black Telegraph, responsibility was divided in three ways: Deedes edited the opinion pages; the appalling Peter Eastwood, the news pages; while Lord Hartwell played the grand old Duke of York. The Deedes/Eastwood duo was essentially a ‘Mr Nice and Mr ...”

“... depicting extreme emotional states. Painting could show the beauty of the world, but according to Max Klinger’s influential 1891 book Malerei und Zeichnung (‘Painting and Drawing’), printmaking could show the darker side of life, the torments and fantasies of the artist’s mind. Someone, perhaps Munch himself, scribbled ‘Only a madman could paint ...”

“... On​ 27 December 1950, 66 years ago, at the age of 66, the German émigré painter Max Beckmann suffered a heart attack and died on the corner of Central Park West and 69th Street, where for the past eight months he had rented a small apartment and a studio. He had been on his way across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to view the latest (and last) of his self-portraits, the rather gaudy and saddening Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (and Orange Shirt and Purple Sweater-Vest), where the almost unrecognisably pinched-looking painter has lost a couple of hat sizes (as if a lifelong thumb were now an index finger ...”

“... purpose of the book, however, is to commend one kind of criticism and to denigrate others. In Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men there are actually portraits of six men; the seventh is Max. Similarly, The Company of Critics really has 12 subjects-the 11 to whom chapters are devoted and Walzer himself. Scarcely a paragraph goes ...”

“... is a regular visitor to the boxing gym on the upper floor, where the athletic young men – mostly black and Hispanic – spar in a raised ring, thrash oblong leather bags, pump metal, skip rope, and stalk their own images in three or four large mirrors, with a fury that must be reducing the life of the building still further. To stand at the centre of the gym ...”

“... with almost every sentence in it. The problem is perhaps epitomised by Watt’s dependence on Max Weber, who, I increasingly think, had quite a genius for getting things wrong. Watt, speaking of Crusoe’s methodical book-keeping, quotes Weber on ‘profit-and-loss book-keeping’ being ‘the distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism’. But ...”

“... surrender and the overthrow of the kaiser. ‘Again,’ he later wrote, ‘everything went black before my eyes.’ And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our ...”

“... and manly, but gay on a technicality’. Early in 1977, at the University of Utah, he met Max Zimmer, a PhD candidate in his early thirties, who had been brought up as a Mormon. As Cheever felt ‘a profound stirring of love’ and came on to Max, Max felt ‘confusion and ...”