Search Results

“... who do it with any gusto; though not all of them, fortunately, are as crassly enthusiastic as Phyllis Grosskurth is in this book. In this history of Freud’s first group of colleagues – the Committee who, under Freud’s aegis, invented what we now think of as psychoanalysis – Grosskurth ‘ponders the ...”

“... Philosopher of Love, published last year. But students of biography will particularly welcome Phyllis Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original works of its kind, a detailed and sensitive rescuing of its subject from the ...”

“... with bisexual Swiss and Italians. In her Introduction the knowledgeable editor of the Memoirs, Phyllis Grosskurth, is rather ingenuous in accepting this claim at face value: not only because Symonds’s tastes were known to both his father and his wife (as Vaughan’s, incidentally, had been to his), but more importantly because of the allusions ...”

“... The two books under review take quite different views of the achievements of their subjects. Phyllis Grosskurth’s Margaret Mead: A Life of Controversy, which appears in Penguin’s ‘Lives of Modern Women’ series, is really just another moan about the awfulness of Margaret Mead. She was impatient, bossy, over-zealous, incapable of realising ...”

“... these animosities and the gossip on which they fed persisted for so long makes especially welcome Phyllis Grosskurth’s scholarly book, the first full biography of Klein. Melanie Reizes was born in 1882 in Vienna. Her father was a doctor; her mother was forced by straitened financial circumstances to keep a shop selling plants and (bizarrely, since they ...”

“... Melanie Klein has been characterised as a struggle between darkness and light. ‘Anna Freud,’ Phyllis Grosskurth said in her biography of Klein, ‘was an expositor of her father’s ideas, but only of those ideas that could be scrutinised in clearly lit, well-ventilated places ... The witches of the night ride on broomsticks and converse with the ...”

“... left in order to accept a much lower-profile job as vicar of Doncaster. Not until 1964, when Phyllis Grosskurth published her biography of John Addington Symonds, was it revealed that Vaughan had resigned in order to avoid prosecution for sexual offences with a pupil. As late as 1955, in his essay ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, Noël Annan was ...”

“... sexual and spiritual needs and their position in a socialist state.’ It sounds very cerebral. Phyllis Grosskurth suggests something more carnal in her life of Havelock Ellis: What is one to make of these complex relationships? Ellis was clearly deeply in love with Olive Schreiner. She loved him tenderly, but her expectations of him died when he ...”

“... It is to be preferred, I think, to the two most recent large-scale attempts at a Life of Byron, by Phyllis Grosskurth and Benita Eisler. MacCarthy, while happy to recommend, for instance, the virtues of Tom Moore’s highly selective Life of Byron of 1832, hardly acknowledges modern biographies, apart from Marchand’s three-volume account of ...”