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“... Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five poems from a twenty-year-old undergraduate named Jarrell. A published volume received respectful reviews, but it was as a critic ...”

“... His early prose pieces from this period owe an enormous amount to previous humorists, particularly George Ade and Ring Lardner, as Perelman later confessed: ‘I was such a shameless Lardner thief that I should have been arrested.’ His liaison with the Marx Brothers began in 1929, when, during the interval of their Broadway show Animal Crackers, he sent ...”

“... has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit by’. ‘Speculation’, ‘afford’ and ‘profit’ put a poet’s pressure on ‘costive’. Yet should Davie ...”

“... of your seemingly healthy Girton and Newnham Girls break down utterly. So, according to Grant Allen, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s, higher education could damage your health. More to the point, it interfered physically (not just, that is, by opening up wider and more attractive horizons than motherhood) with a woman’s capacity to bear ...”

“... the country, but that was too ambitious: they’ve never sold as well as Pevsner and his publisher Allen Lane had hoped. One reason may be that Pevsner was too confident of his readers’ ability to reconstruct architectural reality in their imagination. In a sense, he knew it: ‘I have given you the facts,’ he said of Buildings of England. ’You must go ...”

“... James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as ...”

“... in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is very welcome, in part because of his ...”

“... Sunni triangle’. ‘Iraq is now the most dangerous spot on earth,’ the CIA director, Allen Dulles, told Congress after the Mosul debacle. Given this background, no one should be surprised that the Baath Party began regrouping in Mosul while the American occupation forces were demolishing Fallujah. In Fallujah, Islamic fundamentalists led the ...”

“... in psychology and literature. Pamela Thurschwell’s fine study of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and George du Maurier1 showed how profoundly the developments in ‘magical thinking’ reverberated in fiction and its portrayal of character and perception; and Malcolm Gaskill recently tackled, with amused brio, the life and times of the last of the materialising ...”

“... miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, speculated openly about coming in to work and finding tanks drawn up on Horse Guards Parade, his colleagues couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking. Was the UK on the brink of a left-wing revolution or a ...”

“... as a worker, creative force and even lover that places Marx in the company of ‘Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence’. Marxist thought and the Modernist tradition converge for Berman, as both try to grasp and confront the modern experience: Marx’s ‘new-fangled men ... as much the invention of modern time as ...”

“... at the time. After the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938, Allen Tate proclaimed his style ‘the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot’. Old Possum himself sent words of admiration: ‘I want to see more poetry from you.’Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the son of Romanian Jewish ...”

“... of Commentary, was closely involved from the early Fifties until the early Seventies: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer. It was in the early years of this same period, the first five years of the Sixties, that what was often called the Family, a closely allied group of mostly New York ...”

“... was an acknowledged masterpiece, produced such works as James Audubon’s Birds of America, George Henry Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies, Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone and innumerable commercial contemplations of flowers, shells and natural novelties. Alternately artistic and sentimental in impulse, the tradition of nature-appreciation inspired works ...”

“... Moorcock’s distemper remains, despite the viral assaults of life in a genetically-modified George W. Bush fiefdom (fevers, sweats, steroid-regimens), genially satiric rather than venomous and bile-secreting; he targets the virtual reality spooks of Lit-Lite. The fawn jackets. The suit-bags. The shaved sentences. English fiction (the creative reading ...”