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“... mere horizontal force. The publication of the second volume of Hershel Parker’s biography of Herman Melville brings to a close an enterprise of archival and critical scholarship that has lasted forty years – nearly as long as Melville’s writing career. The picture of ...”

“... thin as a little finger, it grows for nearly ten years until it’s as wide as 25 cm at the base. Herman Melville writes of the ‘nostril whale’ in Moby-Dick: ‘Some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer … But you cannot prove either ...”

“... The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Spectre (1967), to his astonishing psychobiography of Herman Melville, Subversive Genealogy (1983), to Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996), Rogin’s writing was driven by the desire to expose hidden histories. He sought to burrow deeply into the strata where psychic ...”

“... we heard something like that? In several no doubt, but notably in that formulaic little tale by Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. With Bartleby the case is different. ‘I would prefer not to.’ He continues to prefer not to until he dies of inanition. What is the mystery behind the life of Bartleby, or of Anna Durrant? Really none at ...”

“... and all hell broke loose. Delano’s memoir sold very few copies, despite the lurid story. But Herman Melville came across it decades later and reworked the themes of deception and desperation into one of his most famous works. ‘Benito Cereno’ was serialised in Putnam’s Magazine in 1855, just as the crisis over slavery in the United States was ...”

“... the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few hours while their masters visited each other, and the 22-year-old Melville caught sight of the Wirt’s captain. He was impressed: ‘He was a large, powerful, well-made ...”

“... the side of the vessel and thrashed at it with his tail as it was being raised on the davits. And Melville, or rather Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, tells a story in Chapter 45 of Moby-Dick about a ‘portly sperm whale’ fetching an American sloop-of-war ‘such a thwack that with all his pumps going he made straight for ...”

“... Melville began writing Pierre, or The Ambiguities in August 1851; he had just turned 33 and was already the author of six books. The most recent of these, Moby-Dick, was about to be published, and reviews of it, largely negative in the United States and somewhat less so in England, would begin appearing while he was working on the new novel and negotiating the terms for its publication ...”

“... sperm whales and is an accretion that builds up around indigestible material such as squid heads.Herman Melville culled his knowledge of whales from his voyage aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841-42 and from authoritative texts ranging from William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), through encyclopedia entries, to Frederick Bennett’s ...”

“... spot’. The islands’ blasted aspect, however, made them unpopular with visitors. Herman Melville, who visited in 1841, had the usual reaction: ‘Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outsize city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of ...”

“... enough to face the worst. If we read further we find that Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Melville, Thomas Hardy and the author of Ecclesiastes are also members. Edmund Blunden thought The City of Dreadful Night a great anticipation of The Waste Land. If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter ...”

“... and taskmaster of the Westish Harpooners – so named because of a rather tenuous connection to Herman Melville, the subject of a legendary dissertation-turned-critical-blockbuster called The Sperm-Squeezers by the college president, Guert Affenlight, the only thing of worth he’s ever produced. Guert has a daughter, Pella, 23: plucky, comely and on ...”

“... Austen, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, Samuel Smiles, Herman Melville and Washington Irving were all published from Albemarle Street. J.M.W. Turner and David Roberts provided illustrations for Murray Books. Granted, it’s a major archive. But the firm’s traditional dislike of fiction and poetry somewhat ...”

“... of the poet with the madness of the mathematician’. Perec in particular constantly invokes Herman Melville: W’s narrator identifies not with ‘Ahab’s boiling fury’ but with the sober and scrupulous Ishmael; the puzzle-making central figure in La Vie mode d’emploi is named ‘Bartlebooth’, splicing together Valery Larbaud’s ...”

“... as truth. Its practitioners were necrophiliacs ‘quick in pursuit of the dead’. In her book on Herman Melville, she wrote of the ‘violent exuberance’ that accompanied his rediscovery by critics in the 1920s: ‘He was unearthed … the whole skeleton, as it were, put under the floodlights, a penetrating radar giving the bones a voluptuous ...”