Search Results

“... a third of whom replied to the question of what they feared most in the world: ‘Getting fat.’ Maud Ellmann’s The Hunger Artists had already appeared when Jane Fonda announced her latest incarnation, but if one were to extend the associative logic by which Ellmann interprets the actress’s earlier ...”

“... autobiographer to do? Perhaps simply set all scruples aside for the sake of getting the job done. Maud Ellmann recounts the imperviableness of several pioneering psychoanalysts to the implications for narrative of their own theories, which emphasise fracture, upheaval, trauma and neurosis over the conscious processes of mental life and the orderly ...”

“... brogue. Almost all of his other novels are poor stuff, and Dracula itself is far from perfect. As Maud Ellmann pointed out in her Oxford edition of the book, characters change hair colour inexplicably, turn up at the wrong hotels, lapse in and out of silly accents, conduct operations without anaesthetic and blood transfusions without regard to ...”

“... come to think that the impersonality business was nonsense anyway. This is roughly the position of Maud Ellmann’s brisk first book. Eliot called Pound’s Cantos ‘a reticent biography’, and she thinks we should apply the same description to Eliot’s work. According to her, early Modernism, despite the contrary pretence, was always ...”

“... sources of inspiration, enacts the violation of Bleistein’s body. Eliot deforms those texts. As Maud Ellmann has noted, he ‘desecrates tradition’ at the opening of The Waste Land – twisting Chaucer on the sweetness of spring – and aims to steal and blasphemously deface the works he pilfers. Frank Kermode calls that seminal poem a work of ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers ...”

“... some realms and not in others, and that difference, even enmity, doesn’t prevent collusion. As Maud Ellmann writes in her introduction to On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, part of the New Penguin Freud series, ‘what is remarkable about Freud’s work is the insight that impulse and repression are complicit rather than opposed.’ A wonderful ...”

“... Stephen says: ‘Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.’ Richard Ellmann virtually solved it in Ulysses on the Liffey (1972) with his chapter called ‘The Riddle of Scylla and Charybdis’, which argues that ‘the answer to the sphinx’s riddle was man, the answer to Scylla-Charybdis’s is the act of love.’ But that ...”

“... involved with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society; he was courting new friends, including Maud Gonne, and writing a few reviews. According to Richard Ellmann, William too was offered a job at this time, but turned it down because it was on a Unionist newspaper. Jack was at art college. At the end of that year, Lily ...”

“... by the success of The Vision of Salome, a titillating dance entertainment starring the voluptuous Maud Allan, herself an icon for homosexuals and a focus for stories of sexual debauchery that included manifold lesbian liaisons and affairs with the King and the Duke of Westminster. Such ‘degeneracy’ was too much for conservatives to swallow, and in the ...”

“... years he also suffered continually from the many wounding disappointments inflicted on him by Maud Gonne, whose intransigence he rewarded with the best love poetry of the century. Eventually he found complicated reasons to be grateful for her unrelenting refusal to understand or accept him: ‘What matter? How much of the best I have done and still do is ...”

“... Its style and approach, it’s true, bring Kitty Kelley to mind more often than Richard Ellmann: it is aimed squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by pseudo-profound sentences such as ...”

“... and argumentative ways to the Rebellion’s myth.In August 1916, Yeats was staying in France with Maud Gonne – whose husband, John MacBride, had been among those executed by the British – when he received a letter from Lady Gregory. She was, she wrote, ‘a little puzzled’ by Yeats’sapparent indifference to Ireland after your excitement after the ...”