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“... suited to gigs than to the page. Bucknell discusses the way the poets were encouraged by Tony Richardson, their editor at Penguin, to piggyback on the Beatles’ success, using a ‘sales pitch’ that transposed the notion of a ‘Mersey sound’ from pop music to poetry, and cites a number of critics who pointed out that the Liverpool poets’ dalliance ...”

“... confusion of economic principles in the mind of James himself, Berland concludes: ‘It is the mark of obscurity (as distinct from difficulty) that a text cannot be understood definitively, owing to the absence of the elements necessary for certainty. And The Golden Bowl is obscure ...’ It is good to have this lucidity directed at late James, and it is ...”

“... be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more difficult. His private life was extraordinary ...”

“... this post at Court, urged on by her father. Whenever the Queen’s bell rang (‘so mortifying a mark of servitude’) she had to hurry to attend to her. Worst of all, she was left ‘unremittingly’ in the company of Mrs Schwellenberg, the Queen’s favourite courtier and the ‘Cerbera’ guarding the regal gate. Davenport catches the sheer ...”

“... really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South ...”

“... didn’t work for him, and so wouldn’t be covered; researchers and secretaries, like the woman Mark Garnier sent to the sex shop, work for individual MPs, not for Parliament: if they have a complaint, the Equality Act stipulates that it has to be taken up first with their employer, who’s quite possibly the culprit, before they can appeal to an employment ...”

“... some would say it has worsened – since the first democratic elections of 1994? In the words of Mark Solms, psychoanalyst, neuroscientist and owner of a farm in nearby Franschhoek, who also attended the conference, the question for the white beneficiaries of apartheid is ‘how we had sort of got away with it’ (not the outcome he personally had ...”

“... Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude. They are not simply suckers and/or closet racists ...”

“... the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A Likeness’ by his previous biographer Joan Richardson (I haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who ...”

“... that there has been considerable embarrassment among critics about this sonnet. In 1840 D.L. Richardson wrote: ‘I could heartily wish that Shakespeare had never written it.’ In 1963 H.M. Young argued that Sonnet 20 ‘simply could not have been written by a homosexual’. How, he asked, could the one thing which Nature added – a penis – be ...”

“... for which a baggy sort of Unitarian feeling seemed to allow room. What she admired in the poet Mark Akenside, author of The Pleasures of Imagination, was what she called ‘the purest Theism; liberal, cheerful, and sublime’, which seems to describe her own position too: that might help explain her influence on later poets with no Unitarian dogma to ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”

“... 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked ...”

“... impression that he was homosexual. Especially when my mother’s jabs began hitting the mark, I found myself moodily adapting some of Lester’s plaints. ‘The other ladies make all the bread.’ ‘I ain’t groovy like the other ladies.’ ‘Those LRB cats goin’ to give all their reviewing gigs to the other ladies.’ It was a struggle to be ...”