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“... likely to have derived his eclectic borrowings? No single source can be cited with confidence: as Frank Manuel showed years ago (The 18th Century confronts the Gods, 1959), comparative mythology had been advancing for more than one hundred years. Jacob Bryant’s A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1775) was mentioned once by Blake, and he ...”

“... John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with harmonics and textual interpretation in a late cantata such as ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf ...”

“... herself to be a witness to a monstrous piece of history (‘I was in the same barracks as Anne Frank. Of course, I didn’t know who she was then. There were just some Dutch girls. They cried all the time.’) Watching the VJ Day commemorations brought it back. ‘I saw those old men, Japanese prisoners of war, and I thought: you shouldn’t forget. Nobody ...”

“... death not to have been a meaningless horror. Oswald’s committing the act alone is about as close to meaningless as we can get, and almost any plot is better than that. In March 1963, a few months before Kennedy’s assassination, Thomas Pynchon published a novel in which a character learns what is said to be ‘life’s single lesson’: ‘that there ...”

“... Weill, and had a choir of fifty rabbis, plus a cast of nearly five hundred, including the young Frank Sinatra. Huge audiences went to see it in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl. In Washington it was seen by Eleanor Roosevelt, who praised it in her newspaper column.We Will Never Die led Hecht to Zionism, or at least to one wing ...”

“... Speaking of the American painters he championed in the 1960s – Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella – Fried observed that their work ‘not only arises largely out of their personal interpretations of the situation in which advanced painting found itself at crucial moments in their respective developments’: it ‘also aspires to be judged, in ...”

“... tinged with religious yearning, while the earthier Count Guillem de Peiteus preferred love at close hand: I can’t stand their vern acular Who’d keep my love from me afar. By way of words, I guess I’ve found A little saying that runs rife: Let others mouth their loves around; We’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife. (Snodgrass) The unlikely ...”

“... four commanders. Since the stalemate at Kobani there are signs that the Islamic State’s power is close to its peak, especially now that it’s fighting no fewer than five enemies: the Iraqi and Syrian armies, the US air force, the Kurdish peshmerga and the Free Syrian Army. But even if it remains a force it won’t be able to satisfy the demands of those it ...”

“... history of urban planning. After all, the trains which first obliged passengers to sit or stand in close proximity to one another for hours on end without exchanging a word ran between rather than across the great conurbations. Considered as a people-mover, the elevator ranks with those other epochal Fin-de-Siècle inventions, the motor car and the ...”

“... hampered by his reluctance to discuss his friend’s sexual and financial affairs – he was on close terms with Tombe’s mistress but had often lied to her on Tombe’s behalf, and was certainly aware of, if not actively involved in, a lot of the criminal stuff. Tombe’s corpse finally turned up a year and a half later in a cesspit in Surrey, at the farm ...”

“... the letters of Cicero, translate them into another language, then back into Latin, then check how close he had come to the original. He should study the letters of stylish contemporaries such as Languet’s friend the historian and spy Pietro Bizzarri, a sample letter from whom (in Italian) Languet sent Sidney in November 1573, hoping that ‘in admiring it ...”

“... contained. It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It ...”

“... The first real mutiny novel, Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859), captured this frank, demoralising view by ending with the massacre of Kanpur, and the death of all the protagonists. Unsurprisingly, later novels would conclude on a brighter, triumphant note, making Kanpur less like the charge of the Light Brigade and more like the Alamo ...”

“... at his memorial service. ‘So many of us felt that was his destiny.’ He himself was engagingly frank in discounting this scenario, saying that ‘it would have been a disaster for the Party, country and for me.’ Certainly, he never looked back with any wistfulness, still less envy, on the way that this possibility was foreclosed by the spectacular rise ...”

“... mystics. In order to cram some of them, like Knut Hamsun, into his box and then to be able to close the lid, Gay has to create the category of anti-modern Modernist. He arranges his protagonists in traditional groupings, visual artists first, followed by the literary crowd, the music consort, then architects and designers, and finally dramatists and ...”