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“... Something else that catches the eye, given where things were headed, is that his mother, Emily, played the cello. Russell was no Glenn Gould-style prodigy, but he does seem to have wilfully set his own course from very early on. ‘He was ahead of his age in the things he cared about,’ according to his sister Kate, ‘and that led to all kinds of ...”

“... United States in the year following its publication – even such serious-minded critics as Edmund Wilson and the young Lionel Trilling regularly disparaged her as spinsterish, middlebrow and reactionary: a kind of tiresome maiden aunt in the back parlour of American letters. True, Cather had her defenders – but as Acocella grimly notes, they were prone to ...”

“... mixture of the homely and exotic. She has acquired the honorary but eccentric status of an Emily Dickinson, telling it slant. This oblique trance is my natural Way of speaking, she claims, and this is indeed how her poetic personality comes across: dreamy, meditative, in the world but not quite of it. Selima Hill has some of the same ambivalence ...”

“... Matilda was never quite right after a fall into a coal-scuttle as a child, and would embarrass Emily (who had been engaged to Arthur Hallam) by raising her umbrella in church to keep off the draught. Since the crowded rectory had plenty of books as well as many peculiar persons, it provided an atmosphere conducive to poetry. But no less helpful were the ...”

“... of the proceedings or the jurisdiction of the judges. Prison radicalised many still further. Laura Wilson, a worsted-coating weaver from Halifax told a reporter: ‘I went to jail a rebel, but I have come out a regular terror.’ Despite the ground it shared with other suffrage organisations, and despite its male supporters, the WSPU was unique as a separatist ...”

“... hotel – ‘distraught’ and ‘in wet clothes’. My italics. The prodigality reminds me of Emily Dickinson: As if I asked a common Alms, And in my wondering hand A Stranger pressed a Kingdom, And I, bewildered, stand – Then there is the little, optionally extra dog taking ‘rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf’, or Laughter in ...”

“... I remember The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes! In other words, as G. Wilson Knight first pointed out in 1972, the ‘hyacinth girl’ was initially conceived as male and, like Phlebas, appears to have drowned, or so the section’s concluding quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das ...”

“... unlike William Wilde, who by the time of his marriage had had two further illegitimate children, Emily and Mary, born in 1847 and 1849, who were taken care of as wards by William’s eldest brother, Ralph. (John Butler Yeats believed that the mother of these two girls kept a ‘black oak shop’ in Dublin.) William fully acknowledged his illegitimate ...”

“... twenty pages the presiding genius is in any case not strictly speaking Victorian at all, being Emily Dickinson: who for Davie represents those qualities which in the earlier part of the anthology shine in Herbert and Vaughan, Watts and Wesley, Smart and Cowper. That none of these writers has the obvious ‘scale’ or bulk of a Browning is perhaps to ...”

“... Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new novel, Either/Or. It’s a sequel to my first novel, The Idiot. Both books are set during my own college years, in the ...”

“... Castle had had a similar problem in the late 1940s when she went to Canada with her boss, Harold Wilson, when he was president of the Board of Trade. ‘Wives are never invited’ to official dinners, she was told. ‘“I am not Harold’s wife,” I retorted hotly. “I am not even his mistress. I am his PPS.”’ It’s interesting to see just how much ...”

“... and which has promoted the Cotswolds as England’s imaginary heart, has perhaps less taste than Emily Brontë for the wild solitudes of the moors; indeed Charles Jennings in Up North, his ‘travels beyond the Watford Gap’, an only half-humorous exploration of regional difference, complains that the North is deficient in open space. In the current ...”

“... Dimbleby adds, by way of rumour, that Major and Hurd regarded the outgoing governor, Sir David Wilson (who was sacked to make way for Patten), ‘as one of the principal advocates of the “appeasement” of China, an approach which they believed could no longer be sustained after the atrocity of Tiananmen Square in June 1989’. But, while he avoids ...”

“... recognised by contemporaries: ‘one of the great minds and imaginations of our day’, Edmund Wilson wrote in the 1920s, ‘absolutely comparable’ to ‘the Nietzsches, the Tolstoys, the Wagners and the Ibsens of a previous generation’.All literary magnitudes are finite. In the case of great writers, it is understandable that their vices should ...”