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“... the age of 18, ‘possession withers them.’ It was an insight from which he never recovered. As Benjamin Taylor puts it in his new biography, Proust’s ‘vitality’ was ‘checkmated by the excess of self-seeing’; knowing these people – knowing anyone – ended in catastrophic disappointment. Only a new lyricism of self-doubt could do justice to ...”

“... found quite disturbing. Bellow the artist? He is nowhere to be seen and invisibly to be shamed. Benjamin Taylor, who edited the letters, has done a good job in corralling them onto the page, but we don’t ever have enough context, enough flavour, enough suggestion of catalysts or responses, so we are left with the bold Bellow shaking with anger and ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... arresting time and focusing on the key moments of a concatenation, in a similar way to what Walter Benjamin thought photographs did in changing our perception of human movement: Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the ...”

“... Buckley, the kidnappers struck again. This time the victim was a Christian missionary called Benjamin Weir. In January 1985, Father Lawrence Jenco was captured, to be followed three months later by Terry Anderson. Where was Ollie North all this time? In 1981, he was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security Council, which is attached to ...”

“... in the process. Imagine Proust, propped up in bed, rambling about his writing life, crossed with Benjamin, in his last days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, rearranging his Arcades notes, and add a little of the ‘I can’t go on, I go on’ of Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate here accuses ...”

“... the excavation site. The earlier period of Mackenzie and Scott needs more attention, and William Taylor of Norwich and the increasing company of provincial Dissenting students of German are too quickly dismissed; the large band of translators of Schiller (apart from Coleridge) is unaccountably ignored. The scholars of the Classics, philosophy and ...”

“... novels that are praised on social media as ‘discursive’ and ‘weird’ (e.g. the work of Benjamin Labatut or Jenny Erpenbeck). Unfortunately, Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?Sadie Smith (the name did make me ...”

“... scene as well. The Five Spot Café, an artists’ hangout just off the Bowery, opened with Cecil Taylor, gave Thelonious Monk his first extended gig, and introduced New York to Ornette Coleman.) Many of the pieces in Inventing Downtown are proudly uncommercial. The exhibition includes work by a number of black and women painters, many of whom dropped out or ...”

“... within which many political persuasions – from Clarendon, Hume and Macaulay to A.J.P. Taylor and E. P. Thompson – have helped an emerging nation make sense of itself. There are now good reasons, as Linda Colley and Chris Bayly have suggested, to bring the Empire to the centre of domestic history and to show how a wider world changed our ...”

“... and many subsequently worked to share their good fortune with others. Bodichon’s father, Benjamin Leigh Smith, was the main supporter of the Westminster Infants’ School, a progressive institution founded on the Owenite and Pestalozzian principles of activity, co-operation and all-round development, which he established in Vincent Square in 1826 ...”

“... forceful Victorian women, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon had a strong father and an obscure mother. Benjamin Smith, known in the family as ‘the Pater’, came from a formidable line of radical activists who had campaigned vigorously against the slave trade, and fostered projects for educational and political reform. Capable and self-assured, he combined ...”

“... of the Bible itself, and Clarke’s approach and title were echoed by the Dissenting divine John Taylor in an equally notorious interrogation of the Calvinist doctrine of salvation in The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1740). Articles of religion were denounced as a quasi-Popish hangover which restricted the much-vaunted freedom of Protestants to ...”

“... Luckily, as we may think, he came into the orbit of a charismatic English teacher. ‘Professor Taylor’s life-changing freshman seminar’, as he calls it in Galatea 2.2, won the young Powers for Literature. (I haven’t been able to identify who ‘Taylor’ was – he has, apparently, since died. Doubtless the ...”