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“... giving much sense of what he makes of his subject – ends with the story of Stoner’s revival. Edwin Frank of NYRB Classics suggests that it’s ‘an American book like an Edward Hopper painting’, which sounds about right as an explanation of its popularity on this side of the Atlantic. ‘The English cult of the mid-century American ...”

“... why Austen readers could find her thoroughly disturbing. Jane Austen and her contemporaries had a frank curiosity about one another’s personalities and lives which often at the time came under fire as vulgar prying. A passion for gossip at all levels made the early 19th century an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking ...”

“... Sir Edwin (Ned) Landseer Lutyens, architect of genius, was a master of the false trail and the misleading, if jocular, aside. Born and educated in London, he preferred to dwell on his formative years in rural Surrey. Although trained in the architectural office of Ernest George and Harold Peto, the older of whom was an able vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders ...”

“... flawed. Medical politics have always been, and remain, far more ambiguous. This is deftly shown in Frank Mort’s Dangerous Sexualities, a survey of sexual policing in England since the accession of Victoria. Focus initially upon the Early Victorian years, he suggests, and you see what appears to be an irresistible alliance of doctors, experts, reformers and ...”

“... Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue ...”

“... It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a Surrealist Arcady.Mathews credited Roussel with showing him that prose could be generated under similar constraints to those ...”

“... New Zealand, all national dots. Not all poets love places. And not many poets love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close ...”

“... found notorious in the country.We made a trip into Glasgow to a care home on the Crow Road, where Edwin Morgan was then living and writing. He and I had corresponded when he left his old flat and lost his library. I sent him some books and we agreed to see each other in Glasgow. Eddie was a city man. He was a city poet. It must have been odd for him to have ...”

“... All this talk brings the ears so far forward that they make blinkers for the eyes’: thus Edwin Lutyens on architectural discourse. In Lutyens’s day it was still possible, just, to believe that the good architects got on with designing and building while only the second-raters taught and wrote. Books were chiefly for reference – for illustrations, rules and technicalities ...”

“... by the papers. There were young admirers at Goulburn. Accommodating love letters from her cousin Edwin Bridle written between 1905 and 1907 are carefully preserved; as are her flirtatious exchanges with the handsome Demarest Lloyd in Chicago before the First World War. But she said she destroyed other letters, perhaps those she received from William Bross ...”

“... Fuzzy and Jean at school, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson, Janetta in Ibiza. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going ...”

“... for the office, clearly knowing when he was licked. You couldn’t hope to out-dress old Frankie-Frank Spellman, one of the great bitch drag queens of this or any other age. Nobody should grudge the frumpish Hoover a fling or two, or indeed a flounce, though probably with his figure and complexion the stockings were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind ...”

“... after another, the common denominator being blond matinée idol looks. The prototype was Edwin Pond Parker II, a Connecticut stockbroker whom she married just before he enlisted in 1917 and whose pleasingly Wasp name she retained. They separated in 1922. Before long, she became pregnant (by another twerp), had an abortion and made the first of ...”

“... was published in 1916. ‘White-collar crime’ was also an interest of the American sociologist Edwin Sutherland, whose main work on this subject was published in 1949. In this country, however, dominated as its criminology has been by technical and administrative concerns, the interest of scholars has been periodic and largely indecisive. The only period ...”

“... the Welfare State. ‘When Democracy builds’ was the title of an ardent and prophetic lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ned’s near-contemporary. But, for Lutyens, democratic government could ‘only work through compromise, leaving its conscience in the hands of accountants’. Hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas and underground railway stations had no ...”