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“... Forster was similarly uncowed by the shadow of Henry James, taking swipes at James’s disciple Percy Lubbock and implying that it was silly to get hung up on doctrines of ‘economy and architecture’. You could arrange a story in the shape of an hourglass, as Forster said James had done in The Ambassadors, and triumph on your own terms, ‘but at what ...”

“... power far superior to that of any other English peer, and second only to the king’s. For the young Richard II, who was almost exactly of an age with his cousin, this was not a comfortable prospect. Mortimer believes that he was also jealous and resentful of Henry’s applauded manly accomplishments. Their relations, and Richard’s relations with ...”

“... idiom of a Commencement Day address. The book is designed, I take it, to produce just the flexible young professionals the market is looking for, but whether anyone will conduct a note after reading it is open to reasonable doubt. Zeno’s paradox disproving the possibility of motion comes irresistibly to mind as one labours in vain to reintegrate the ...”

“... Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in 1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had been mentored by Ford Madox Ford, who had her read an early draft of her first novel, Penhally, out loud to him. She was edited by Maxwell Perkins, and had published eight novels and one short story collection. O’Connor was familiar with ...”

“... A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled. He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered. ‘All these books. I’ll never catch up,’ wails the ...”

“... art creates its own reality and issues no passports. This swirling, uplifting work (its oak kept young and vital by varnish) may also realise Brancusi’s sole intention, ‘to bring joy’, and he’s abetted by its accessibility, a vexing issue in regard to Modernism’s afterlife. How often is Ulysses read beyond the classroom? Have you ever noticed how ...”

“... How to be black in America was the challenge for spirited young men of colour who found their way to Harlem in the troubled years of the 1940s, when music, poetry, dance and art were giving way to drink, drugs, street crime and sex for money. Malcolm Little’s first impulse was to cut loose in the big city where he found himself soon after his 17th birthday in 1942 ...”

“... calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is trapped into marrying. Sturgis never makes any play on this lurking pun, though as a treacherous and neglectful wife Cissy is a constant taunting reminder of Sainty’s sissiness. The great moment for Sainty comes early on, when the boys are ...”

“... words, ‘to dress frilly people in colours that confuse the eye’, and appearing as a peevish young icon slouched on a chair with a moody, come-hither expression, a pure white cat on his lap and his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired ...”

“... Idaho medievalism by combining poesy and Boise) who has set up a poetry bureau in which rich young idiots are coached in free verse, which Poise then supplies to tame editors who would ‘publish anything Ezekiel sends them’. Imagists made much of the similarities between metrical form and production-line values, but the implication here is that it’s ...”

“... inhabitants of Marlow, for example, who were treated to the recurrent spectacle of a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in life, still much struck. ‘His steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was ...”

“... to subversion: ‘I don’t know whether you saw any of the rather naughty stuff I put old Percy Bysshe up to.’ This raises a few problems. Ostensibly an experiment in sweeping satire, Sweet Dreams is also an elaborate private joke, at the expense of Cambridge contemporaries. God runs Heaven after the example of the tutorial system. Frayn invests ...”

“... Pericles is only the loudest in a chorus of voices from the past – Rilke, Katherine Mansfield, Percy Shelley, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Beethoven – which Smith uses to organise the torrent of the contemporary, but the stories of Pericles and Marina provide something like a shape for the two most compelling characters in the novel. Richard ...”

“... letter in which he reports that symmetry has demanded 22. Though several letters imply that as a young man he had no trouble adhering to space restrictions, by the 1890s, at least, the pattern seems fixed. Yet the impression of haplessness James liked to convey as words ran away with him can be terribly deceptive, if only because he never lost the ...”

“... had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in ...”