Search Results

“... had brought out crucial differences between the two men which each had refused to see: as William Haller said long ago in his astute and still highly readable Early Life of Robert Southey (1917), the scheme was thrilling to Coleridge as a philosophical experiment, while appealing to Southey chiefly as a set of rules. Coleridge, ever eager to find in ...”

“... Each appears here in a representative figure: the bibliographer Fredson Bowers and the interpreter William K. Wimsatt. McKenzie singles them out for tactical purposes – that is to say, in order to place each of them at the centre of his double-focused critique of the traditional theory of texts. ‘There is nothing outside of the text.’ That well-known ...”

“... William Godwin’s​ attack on aristocratic oppression in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t pull its punches. ‘Each man,’ he wrote, ‘should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it, as the general peace of society will permit ...”

“... which he describes, not once but many times, as the military paradigm. The author calls Byron in aid. ‘What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dress, their banners and their art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.’ It hardly needed ...”

“... in literature would know already. In an initial compilation chapter Caroline Lamb falls for Byron, and Elizabeth Smart for George Barker, while Mary Godwin and Shelley shadow the literary love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip ...”

“... because for more than twenty years she was the consort of the Duke of Clarence, the future King William IV, bore him ten children and lived with him in a state of domestic happiness and connubial bliss. But it would also be ambiguous because before, during and after this well-known, much publicised and highly controversial royal liaison, she was a self-made ...”

“... as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s splendid new book meticulously points out, that another is still William Shakespeare.The truth is that, for all the enthusiastic assertions of Major Longden and his ilk, Shakespeare has always been somewhat miscast in the role of England’s national poet. There is nothing in his non-dramatic poetry remotely suitable for ...”

“... helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier biographers, Professors Jack Barbera and William McBrien (who also compiled the uncollected writings under the nauseating title Me Again), for all their hard work and evident devotion, too often failed in their tone, by turns solemn and arch: a combination of a perhaps mimetic sort to which writing ...”

“... poet something of a celebrity. For a time he edited Voorslag, a literary journal, with his friend William Plomer: but before long he had quarrelled with his backers and his family, and he and his wife returned to England. There they met Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and there, while Campbell worked to support his family by writing journalism, Vita ...”

“... certain privileged social groups – in effect, the licence of the lawless aristocrat. From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, the aristocrat and the anarchist have always been secret bedfellows. If the English love a character, they also love a lord, which is one reason Byron (who was literally an aristocrat) and Wilde (who was ...”

“... others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers. As it turns out, you’re not really famous until you’ve left a written trace ...”

“... salt and pepper as you please.’ In a 1936 review, Clifford Fadiman recommended that the prose of William Faulkner be taken with just such a hefty pinch of salt. Fatigued by ‘the Non-Stop or Life Sentence’ which he considered to be the ruin of Absalom, Absalom!, he declared that ‘all of Mr Faulkner’s shuddering invective pales in horrendousness before ...”

“... voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be ...”

“... acting, clearly liked ‘this nameless mode of naming the unnameable’. She told Hunt that William Godwin, her father, had brought out a new two-volume edition of the novel on the strength of the interest generated by the dramatisation. Three more stage versions of Frankenstein had opened by early September, including the burlesque Humgumption; or Dr ...”

“... nothing until now. Penguin sent me some books from their recent series of diaries and letters.* Byron, I am afraid, meant little. Harold Nicolson’s diary gave me some pleasure, though I had read it often before. What has really delighted me is The Daughters of Karl Marx, their family correspondence between 1866 and 1898. Their letters are full of hardship ...”