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“... first met Ravi Shankar and the actor Peter Eyre remembered seeing Barbra Streisand talking to Jonathan Miller, who liked to ‘arse around’ doing sketches while McEwen played. The party carried on later in Scotland, where on his brother’s death McEwen bought Bardrochat, the other family house, an Arts and Crafts mansion in Ayrshire with a music room ...”

“... the performances of Leavis, Graham Hough and Cleanth Brooks on ‘Tears, Idle Tears’; and of Jonathan Culler and Terence Hawkes on William Carlos Williams’s ‘This is Just to Say’. Theories of Structuralism make Gribble particularly angry. He quotes a bit from Roland Barthes only to say he finds it impenetrable. A long paragraph from Culler’s ...”

“... In reviewing a book on literary theory recently, a noted American structuralist, Jonathan Culler, drew a stern line between the sort of assumptions about literature that might do for ordinary ‘readers’ and those that are currently giving ‘vitality’, as he put it, to ‘literary studies’. The point is well taken; and it also casts a certain light on the present book, Deconstruction and Criticism, as well as on the general condition (and conditions) of American academic ‘vitality ...”

“... less privileged returned from a day’s shopping ‘famished and worn out’. One diarist, Ursula Bloom, recalled that when she was a girl, there were no public lavatories and even ‘fashionable ladies went for a day’s shopping with no hope of any relief for those faithful tides of nature until they returned home again.’ A working-class woman was told by ...”

“... his Fulbright trip to Germany; about his relationships with women, and with the spectres of Harold Bloom and Pynchon. He writes about envy, and how it encourages productivity, and how it limits productivity, and about the folly of the very notion of artistic productivity. He writes against blogs, yet allows a comparison between Die Fackel and blogs; he writes ...”

“... be a history of misreadings’ uncannily echoes the insistence of their successor at Yale, Harold Bloom, that criticism and poetry alike depend on ‘creative misunderstanding’. Yet given The Anxiety of Influence’s lofty indifference to the mechanics of bibliographical transmission, it’s characteristically mischievous for McKenzie to substitute for ...”

“... spiritual revolution after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either ...”

“... our cultural insularity that it has taken so long for Pessoa’s work to become known. When Harold Bloom recently listed him among the 26 authors who comprise, for him, the fabled Western Canon, Time magazine implied that this was a symptom of Bloom’s pretentious interest in ‘academic obscurities’. It will certainly be ...”

“... Shall​  we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the city of Sparta ...”

“... the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated a ...”

“... leg of her initial walk down Great Eastern Street, finds herself in an event space known as Iron Bloom. Its current iteration was as the ‘Green Vic’, an ethical version of the soap opera’s Queen Vic, where it was required to ‘employ people from disadvantaged backgrounds’. The food was vegan. ‘All over this area, wealthy corporations seek ...”

“... emerged in fleshy half-seen surfaces from the shadow, as if pouring out of nothingness in order to bloom before him … The Venus stared out of the murkiness of the canvas … When he stepped away from the Venus, blood drove hard through him, making him anxious for an ennoblement of desire and the impossibility to fulfil it – a solitary lucidity of want.This ...”

“... farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of colour that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall ...”

“... Phone boxes have always been ‘obscene’. One of the accusations levelled against Leopold Bloom in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses is that he telephoned ‘unspeakable messages … mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in D’Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox’. In Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris ...”

“... pretended to at least one client (Henry Goldman in 1914) that it was in pristine condition. ‘The bloom of the ages remains as in a fresh flower,’ he said of that particular Fra Angelico. Nor was Berenson altogether the corrupted Faust to Duveen’s Mephistopheles. There were occasions when he actually complained, as to René Gimpel, that the dealer was not ...”