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“... mesmerising: W.H. Auden believed that Eliot had had a mystical vision when he was a young child, Hart Crane was convinced that he was secretly gay, while Delmore Schwartz was a fount of scurrilous stories about Eliot’s sex life, which, according to Schwartz, included a relationship with the Jewish woman referred to as Rachel née Rabinovitch in ‘Sweeney ...”

“... remarking to various friends on the pleasures of Mrs Carlyle’s, Keats’s and Coleridge’s and Henry James’s letters, and the depressing nature of Hart Crane’s and Edna St Vincent Millay’s correspondence. ‘A friend of Lota’s,’ Bishop wrote in 1970, ‘burned all my letters to Lota, which Lota had carefully ...”

“... of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick ...”

“... I think.’ Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre,’ he ...”

“... worst anxieties to him. His father was a shoe salesman. In his early forties, after winning an O. Henry Award, Cheever went to see his mother. He reported the following exchange: ‘I read in the newspaper that you won a prize.’ ‘Yes, mother, I didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t terribly important to me.’ ‘No, it wasn’t to me ...”

“... in films and on television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the ...”

“... His ghost had joined the other ghosts haunting the halls of Union College, including the ghost of Henry James’s father, who had briefly been a student there, and Henry James’s grandfather, who had helped to fund the college and whose portrait hung in the president’s house. When her correspondence with Yeats ...”

“... some way influenced the nation’s life’, this would require the inclusion not only of Henry Ford and Walt Disney, but also of the CEOs of most big American corporations in the past century. This is one of the several ways in which one runs up against the limitations, for the purposes of historical understanding, of taking individual lives and ...”

“... attack. ‘He’s either a great fraud or a genius,’ Clare Boothe Luce reported to her husband Henry, owner of Time magazine. ‘Probably both.’ Hearing his plans, Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the grandly-named US Asiatic Fleet, wrote to his wife: ‘Douglas is, I think, no longer altogether sane ... he may not ...”

“...  Henry James​ ’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... her playmates to the children of Harvard professors. As an infant, she was placed in the arms of Henry David Thoreau (apparently he couldn’t tell which end of the baby was which).In 1877, she met David Todd, a ‘blond with magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had ...”