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“... For anyone with a teenage daughter their scabrous subject-matter is hard to take. They would scare Martin Amis. It needed a true appreciation of literary talent to spot their quality. The same true appreciation ensures that the prose in the LRB rarely falls below a certain standard and that the level of argument is kept up. Not all of the best LRB writers are ...”

“... manner, a manner as blunt and accessible as in Herbert’s poetry or Aubrey’s prose. As Bernard Bergonzi shows in an acute and learned essay, Davie has had a long love-hate relationship with Ezra Pound, the poet par excellence of International Modernism. Davie once agreed with Leavis that Pound had ‘no real understanding of culture or ...”

“... were to my mind no higher values (it was all helped by my having an instant crush on Millicent Martin). I’m now more aware of the programme’s limitations: driven by overconfident young men such as David Frost and Bernard Levin, much of its content might generously be called ‘undergraduate humour’. Though ...”

“... them as ‘the carcass over which the turkey buzzards are gathered together’. The financier Bernard Kock agreed to transport 5000 freed slaves from Virginia to a free-labour colony on Ile à Vache, off the coast of Haiti, for which he expected to receive $250,000. In April 1863, Kock’s associates recruited an initial party of 450 for the ...”

“... scrambling movie decade that gave us Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, there was nary a murmur from her (just imagine what she might have made of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). We know from Nunez and others that Sontag boogied in Studio 54, and yet where was her disco inferno deep-think? Disco as tribal ecstasy ...”

“... short,’ Freud responded. In Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford reports that Freud told him that when Andrew Parker-Bowles protested about the way his stomach protruded, Freud ‘thought I’d better emphasise it more’. Freud​ met Caroline Blackwood at a party in 1949 when she was 18. Three years later, he ...”

“... or New Order – ‘Here are the young men,’ oh will you just fuck off – but Fisher quotes Bernard Sumner on the job he got straight out of school at the end of the 1970s, ‘sticking down envelopes, sending rates out’ at Salford town hall. ‘I was chained in this horrible office, every day, every week, for a year, with maybe three weeks’ holiday ...”

“... of Kafka’s; in addition, the father is party, we are told, to an intellectual debate about Martin Buber; we’re also told that he’s a friend of Stefan Zweig’s. But this specificity, even if it doesn’t develop much beyond these few references to an outside world, is not common in the books of yours I’ve read. Hardship generally fells your Jews ...”

“... past: Said made plain that he saw many of the best-known scholars of the Middle East, notably Bernard Lewis, as heirs of 19th-century Orientalism – and as apologists for, if not servants of, a new imperialism.The value of Said’s book was immediately evident to intellectuals who felt their treatment by Western scholarship had been no less ...”

“... then, the apparent romanticism achieved, they become scientific again.’ Much later, Empson told Martin Dodsworth that the structural idea had been ‘to take a story and interpose a scene of apparently total irrelevance in the middle’: we can now confirm the accuracy of that recollection as well as offering belated congratulations to the Granta ...”

“... three stately ladies in the series, ranged alongside Einstein, Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Gershwin, Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis and, ahem, you, Herr Doktor. 8. The Obsessive-Compulsive Globetrotting. As her fame grew, Bernhardt was seldom at home. She was the inverse of agoraphobic; seems to have lived most of her life, in fact, in a sort of high-pitched fugue ...”

“... the stomach: fortunately for the doctor, not so fortunately perhaps for poor 19-year-old Alexis St Martin, a fistula remained which had to be plugged to keep food in, but which also provided an unexcelled window into what happened to food once it disappeared down the throat. So, in what a standard account calls one of the most romantic episodes in the history ...”

“... be produced, the general condition of intellectual life is suggested by the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy, far the best-known ‘thinker’ under 60 in the country. It would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France’s public ...”

“... accounts were written of them entertaining in their house at number 1, Merrion Square. George Bernard Shaw remembered William Wilde ‘dressed in snuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean ...”

“... a coeditor?No, I was the editor. We had a committee consisting of John Fuller, Francis Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, Michael Fried and Gabriel Pearson. We never had meetings or anything like that. There was a lot of correspondence, because John went to Buffalo for a year. So he wrote to me a lot from there. And Michael and Colin had already left ...”