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“... this what we are to call Coetzee’s third-person, present-tense autobiographies, for instance, or Elizabeth Costello’s lectures? – but it has implications for all the labels used in literary criticism. Take the designation ‘late Modernist’, which David Attwell, one of Coetzee’s most astute early champions, applied ...”

“... At​ Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral – which started fifteen minutes late, in deference to her own habitual lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends ...”

“... emerges out of something Sennett says in passing about his old mentor, the Harvard sociologist David Riesman, the author of The Lonely Crowd. Sennett’s picture of what the Jewish Riesman achieved in relation to the wealthy Wasp elite into which he married focuses not on the importance of his feeling respected by them but on his capacity to treat the Wasp ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian ...”

“... in the desert, where they have learned Spanish and been assigned new names: Simón and David. The man is old and people assume that the boy is his grandson. ‘Not my grandson, not my son,’ he explains. ‘But I am responsible for him.’ Novilla seems to be partly a spiritual state. Everyone there has made the same journey, by ship, and they ...”

“... states of affairs currently preoccupying and bedevilling the unhappy place. However, after reading David Lamb’s The Africans these responses should be leavened with another one – despair. For this comprehensive and valuable survey of the status quo in sub-Saharan Africa is such a depressing catalogue of human iniquity that the reader experiences the same ...”

“... with importing Western academic conventions. Under Peter the Great and his successors, the Empress Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, Russia’s Imperial Academy of Arts produced artists – however great their technical ability and however great their talent – who were ultimately indistinguishable from their European counterparts in style and subject ...”

“... Among her admirers, who tend to be wholehearted and fervent, the feeling is that Elizabeth Bishop has not yet received anything like her critical due. Things are improving – in the United States more rapidly than over here, where admission to the Pantheon seems as slow and grudging a process, and as prone to archaic shibboleths and mysterious blackballings, as election to a Pall Mall club ...”

“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... separate out the thread from the ball – rather than gather it up as Theseus had done. In David Copperfield, Mr Wickfield tells David he will ‘unravel’ a clue. In Great Expectations, Dickens refers to a napkin being wielded like a ‘magic clew’, leading ‘the way upstairs’. In The Moonstone, Gabriel ...”

“... sombre. – Made successful piperade for supper. – Joely Richardson excellent and moving in David Hare’s BBC2 Screenplay. Monday 14: Wrote and posted letters to Penny Durrell-Hope and Simon Callow. It seems possible we may see him and a preview of Ballad of the Sad Café when we go up to town to review art shows for TLS. Ordered four books from ...”

“... the institution itself. In her view, three writers only – Amber Reeves, Olivia Shakespear and Elizabeth von Arnim – did that. I can’t quite share her enthusiasm for Reeves and Shakespear, but I think she is absolutely right to describe von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife (1914) as the ‘most remarkable’ of the Edwardian ‘marriage ...”

“... profession, later to become a circus equestrienne’); it can also be detected here and there in Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). But it was still surprising that comedy was so prominent in the interrogatory toolkit he then took to using on opinionated figures closely modelled on himself. ‘My guess is he unbuttons himself when I am ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... her adult life trying to evade. The Children of God was founded in America in 1968 by a man called David Berg. Former members include River and Joaquim Phoenix, Rose McGowan and the writer Lauren Hough, who described Berg as a ‘failed Pentecostal preacher and wildly successful alcoholic’. Ostensibly a Christian movement, it had its roots in the ...”