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“... to rail against the facts. The principal importance of this book is as a day-to-day record of the Wilson Government of 1974 to 1976 as seen by the then Secretary of State for Health and Social Services. Cabinets in this country consist for the most part of ordinary people. Some of them have extraordinary opinions, but one finds few people in government of ...”

“... snake? It may be that a partnership between art and sickness is a trademark of High Modernism, as Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria than the real thing, and to Lawrence, such sickness represents the fatal flaw of the ...”

“... blacksmith Hephaestus, the wounded foot and compensating talents of Chiron, Philoctetes, Byron and Edmund Wilson). The move from four animal to two human feet is the move to humanity standing upright, to the use of the hand (art) that we purchase at the price of the wounded foot (or, in our day, chronic lower back pain). Some, but not all, of Warner’s ...”

“... addict of detective stories, but the view he expressed here seems uncomfortably close to that of Edmund Wilson, who hated the whole business. ‘I find it very difficult,’ Auden said, to read a detective story ‘that is not set in rural England’. Some of us find it difficult to read one that is set in rural England. The difference of taste is not ...”

“... writers and intellectuals (Wells, Bennett, Dreiser, the Auden group, the Marxists, Max Eastman, Edmund Wilson, and most significantly, the later Joyce) whom Leavis judged to have fallen by the wayside. Few if any of his later books were as clear-minded as this, and there is no other work in the last half-century of English literary criticism which can ...”

“... It is true that Partridge had no philological training to speak of. But ‘the word king’, as Edmund Wilson once called him, did not need it. The title is itself a linguistic masterpiece. Academically, it throws down the gauntlet to the orthodox lexicographical establishment, represented by Murray’s successors at Oxford, while at the same time ...”

“... often saw in his lack of humanity a particularly British attitude towards other, lesser nations. Edmund Wilson, in a review of Bakunin (1937), wrote of Carr’s ‘amused condescension’ to his 19th-century Russian liberal and revolutionary subjects, and of his ‘never intermitting British chill, which is always putting Bakunin in his place’. Carr ...”

“... him less than 40 roubles.’ John Lehmann watched him giving ‘huge tips’ to the waiters. Edmund Wilson noted that he would ‘offset the bristling and slant-eyed mask appearance that recalled the Muscovite tsars by a giggle that suggested Edward Lear’. And in 1936 Vera Suvchinskaya appeared in Moscow, settling down to do translation work which ...”

“... in the 2001 postscript to Reliable Essays (subtitled ‘The Best of Clive James) – he reproves Edmund Wilson for failing to learn Spanish and Orwell for his defective notions of imperialism, while saying of his sprightly takedown of Malcolm Muggeridge: ‘If I can say it without sounding as conceited as Muggeridge, on the day I worked him over I was ...”

“... prizes: an audience with one of the famous writers who come to the school to judge their entries. Edmund Wilson has come in the past. Mary McCarthy too. Who will it be this year? Rumours fly. The boys are stirred into a froth, write, posture, jockey for aesthetic advantage. Like bookish bookies, they make odds against each other. And gripe about the ...”

“... all of his soldiers three, the Irish Mulvaney, the Cockney Ortheris and the Yorkshireman Learoyd. Edmund Wilson argues in ‘The Kipling that nobody reads’ that Kipling became an apostle of brutality and authoritarianism from his time in the ‘House of Desolation’. This needs to be re-examined: those dreadful years left their message, but it was a ...”

“... ship had even left dock: We paraded 85 blocks down 5th ave today and were reviewed by President Wilson. About 75,000 were in line and we were ye star attraction. I was made a sergeant in ye squadron and led the 2nd Platoon out in the middle of the avenue all by myself and saluted Ye Great Woodrow. I felt lonesome. It was a Red Cross march but Hemingway ...”

“... premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James (whose ...”

“... the moment we arrived at the studio until the moment we left. She didn’t use a tape recorder. (Edmund Wilson said she was ‘the girl with a tape recorder in her head’.) We watched the live recording from Lorne Michaels’s office, and she went in and out of people’s dressing rooms and availed herself of the catering, but there were no ...”

“... of Proust: Gide’s observation reminds us that it is pointless to get so worked up – as Edmund Wilson did – about Proust’s dogmas on love, jealousy or sex. These are indeed not intended to prove anything. We come to accept them, surely, as bees in the bonnet of an old friend, for it is one of the last secrets of Proust’s art … that the ...”