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“... type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing right. Certainly he never managed to create out of his sufferings the suspense of a ...”

“... falling out of their East Hampton hammocks signing up biographies of high-profile authors such as Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer (three thus far, along with a memoir by one of his former wives, with other exes waiting in the wings to take their whacks). The irony is that publishers seem more eager to bring out books about golden-oldie authors ...”

“... and always, a writer, flush with rage. He was an elective invisible. The artisan, the artificer. John Bayley, describing James Joyce in a review in this journal, called him ‘the penman of the family’. Praise indeed. A curse from which there is no possible abdication, a lifelong task, and one which Ian Penman has accepted with quixotic and sharp-witted ...”

“... Muggletonians was, notably, Christopher Hill, who found significant links between these people and John Milton, as they drank and argued in the London pubs of the 1650s. For Hill and Thompson these were ‘radicals’, political as well as religious activists, part of Hill’s World Turned Upside Down. A vertical history of the subject could not at that time ...”

“... recently nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine works of fiction, only ...”

“... connection with the homeland. Such rites of passage became the staple of popular fiction. In John Buchan’s The Half-Hearted, a cynical and lethargic young man is persuaded to use his knowledge of the Indian frontier to help foil an invasion, and the challenge transforms him. ‘Life was quick in his sinews, his brain was a weathercock, his strength was ...”

“... the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with one of the most harshly negative public reputations among American political figures, was hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the ...”

“... even more effectively, since the visual elements of caricature can be enlisted along with words. Saul Steinberg’s map of the world according to New Yorkers (in which Manhattan looms large, and everything west of the Hudson fades into unsignposted insignificance) neatly makes the point about maps being rooted in their cultures. Why, then, has so much fuss ...”

“... happened was another. (It proved to be a lengthy and difficult business for the military historian John Kaye, who died in 1876 before completing his still standard History of the Sepoy War in India: in three volumes he had taken the narrative only to the end of 1857. More recently, Andrew Ward’s moving account of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 ...”

“... shower curtain, and of the knife tip entering flesh, which both Leigh and Hitchcock denied. And Saul Bass merely storyboarded all the possible angles for the shower montage, at the request of Hitchcock; he did not, as he claimed, direct it. If you really care, you care, and all this might help you in a pub quiz – although people are so inclined to hang on ...”

“... to have human sympathies without the aid of religion or literature. Saturday has an epigraph from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964). Awaiting his mistress, who will shortly reappear wearing little more than a ‘black lace underthing’, Moses H. reflects on ‘what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... here, far from softening it, themselves took on the ruthless quality of the local nature. (John Berryman’s father shot himself in Clearwater, Florida, in 1926, after some failed land speculation.) Eventually, made safe – though never altogether – for year-round habitation by the twin miracles of air-conditioning and refrigeration. Florida still ...”

“... emails, is strikingly similar to the message dropped through the letterboxes of Pepys Road in John Lanchester’s novel Capital – ‘We Want What You Have’.) Lasdun’s parents were Jews who converted to the C of E, and Nasreen’s communications quickly became virulently anti-semitic: ‘Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?’; ‘I ...”

“... Christmas 1938, Lowell, home from Kenyon College where he’d enrolled to study under Tate and John Crowe Ransom, crashed his father’s car. Stafford’s skull and jaw were fractured and her nose crushed. The Lowells were more concerned with their car and their son’s mental instability than with Stafford’s injuries. There was a rumour that the Lowells ...”