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“... when Conrad is most evidently enjoying his solitary meditations. Whereas James’s book is full of close friends and lovers, Conrad almost always represents himself as a lone observer, looking, asking, prying, collecting, then going home, wherever that may be, to hone his prose. On a trip around the United States some boring fellow travellers – a Welsh ...”

“... even London he calls. In futility, weeping to be told: ‘Oh, she died two weeks ago. Are you a close friend?’ ‘No such listing, sorry.’ ‘I have a listing, sir, for the Federal correctional facility at Leavenworth.’ ‘Why should I talk to you? Of all people, you?’ ‘She’s dead. Where you been?’ ‘He died.’ ‘Years ago, she moved way ...”

“... sales that in 1968 she moved to Paris, taught linguistics and related subjects, and was soon in close touch with the likes of Cixous, Kristeva and the rest of the Parisian avant-garde, always an object of suspicion over here. Out, she admits, was directly influenced by Robbe-Grillet, but that relationship of mild dependence was not what she wanted, and with ...”

“... In Frank Auerbach’s Recent Pictures, at Marlborough Fine Art (until 24 October), there may appear to be a compulsive zest. Alleyway and streetscape, seated figure and reclining head, are confidently asserted, eyes jabbed into expression, zig-zag strokes softening edges and sawing up the sides of tower blocks across the Hampstead Road ...”

“... instance of a highly developed state where conservative religion has grown in recent years in close association with radical nationalism. It’s an alarming thought, but a plausible one, that it is Western Europe that may in future be seen as having been the exception. The danger posed by conservative religion, today as in the past, stems from the ...”

“... than England). Some ten novels and four other volumes of poems and stories later, she is at 60 close to being the grand old woman of New Zealand literature. The legacy of Frame’s seven years in and out of psychiatric institutions is described in An Angel at My Table: ‘I inhabited a territory of loneliness which I think resembles that place where the ...”

“... Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the old gnarled banged-up biddy-assed tree and I kept ducking and hugging and bobbing as if you were a tub of water on Hallowe’en it was fun but you threw yourself into reverse like a tractor hugging the ground in spring that was nice too more rain more raincoat                                  (‘Adventures In Living’) Who was O’Hara, and how did he learn to write like that? Born in 1926, he grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, studied piano seriously throughout high school and served in the Navy at the close of World War II ...”

“... Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his Cardiff café on the day she was born. Frank Gauci is a weak, compulsive man who ignores the difficulties of his family and hides behind the pages of the Sporting Life. Azzopardi has a keen sense of the shame of poverty and the humiliation of having to make do; the novel’s wide-eyed ...”

“... of his devious commercial dealings. At the age of 60, when most men of his day would have been close to death, he churned out all his major novels at a punitive pace along with pamphlets, tracts and pseudo-autobiographies, and squeezed all he could out of his castaway hero’s staggering success with a series of second-rate sequels. One of the ironies of ...”

“... there is a certain arbitrariness in the choice of less institutionalised works selected for close examination, especially at the end of the chosen period – virtually yesterday. And obviously there are constraints in addition to those that might be called theoretical or methodological: for instance, Appleyard sensibly leaves out music because he knows ...”

“... market, for instance – that resemble similar moments in When the World Was Steady and are close to being rather too exultant demonstrations of descriptive skill. The differences between the two books are nevertheless considerable, the new one setting itself far more ambitious problems. Some are particularly interesting, as when the narrator claims the ...”

“... better turn to John McDermott’s book; it has been out three years, but evidently did not attract close attention from Salwak. It is a serious lack; by comparison, the attribution to Henry James of a book called Lesson of the Masters and to Cambridge of a Peterhouse College seem venial slips. Rob Nixon, who lives in New York, is an expatriate South ...”

“... he had, nevertheless, a good influence in promoting exactness of citation. Grafton’s essay is close to its end before we discover the importance of Descartes in the history of the footnote. It lies in the fact that Descartes despised the humanities as dependent on mere opinion, and his scorn induced scholars to make their work as scientific, as proof ...”

“... frustration is desired I need only mention that this book is one of those apparently designed to close automatically if the user needs his or her hands for some other purpose, such as grateful note-taking. This is of course not the editor’s fault, but he bears some of the blame for the problems arising from the organisation of the book. For example, if you ...”

“... speculative prehistoric beginnings. Certain discriminations are established from the outset. Any close resemblance between Hughes’s method and the methods of Sir James Frazer or René Girard is explained and discounted. The mere thought of Frazer prompts unavoidable and dismissive allusions to George Eliot’s Casaubon and his ‘Key to All ...”