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“... Kapo – in the 1970s, and all three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a radical narrative ...”

“... assistant, the latest generation of a Somerset gentry family which had served in India since Henry Strachey went out as secretary to Robert Clive. Jane was clever, as patchily educated as most women of her class and generation, but determined to learn and with ‘a vein in her’, as Lytton later recalled, ‘of oddity and ...”

“... been couched either in such pseudo-scientific tracts about the inferiority of certain races as The Bell Curve, or in big alarmist theories like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. It’s not at all surprising that in his last book Huntington fretted about the destruction by Latino immigration of America’s national identity, which is ...”

“... Scott’, and so to the tradition of cultural comparativism so strong in the American novel to Henry James and beyond. It is the comparative, multicultural nature of Don Juan that gives point to the un-English Byron’s statement in the poem:   I am half a Scot by birth, and bred A whole one. Sartor Resartus, whose Ecclefechan author began by writing ...”

“... anxious to place themselves in a context, try hard to evoke it. Sylvia Lawson, a descendant of Henry Lawson, was a pioneer –the pioneer – Australian woman literary journalist in the Fifties. In the editorial office of Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation magazine in George Street, Sydney, she would elegantly sip the wine provided while the rest of us tried to ...”

“... family that one can’t help feeling it would have been proper, as with Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, to publish the work (at least initially) under a pseudonym. The review copy of Theodore Zeldin’s first novel is accompanied by a separately-printed 2,000-word statement by the author, entitled ‘How I came to write Happiness’. This preface is ...”

“... or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his hand to get it.’ This selfishness was not a reversion to ...”

“... fling in Cambridge with a lay-clerk’. Here is the topography of the city of night, from the Bell in King’s Cross to Heaven, the electronic barn underneath Charing Cross which is Europe’s biggest gay club. Pickles’s queens appear to be encircled by some enchantment, an erotic delirium that hides the seediness surrounding them. It will be ...”

“... his daughter’s high-school scholarship in a drawer and who lived his paltry life ‘under a bell-jar – or a thimble – in a very small dark’. The accompanying story concludes with the ironic exchange (about a very unlovely father, with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one ...”

“... Plath, who for Hawthorn had the problem that being a woman – personified in the heroine of The Bell Jar – ‘she is not granted the luxury of a double life.’ But Madame Bovary has one – indeed, three lives and more. Plath’s problem was certainly connected with this disability but took a different form. Like many fictional heroines, she was trying ...”

“... Yankee cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money springs ...”

“... a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their ...”

“... and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a ...”

“... however, to have produced small results. In 1927, Barnes quarrelled with his latest protégé, Henry Hart, who responded with a bullet-point denunciation of Barnes and all his work. Of the teaching aspect, Hall mocked his employer’s ‘delusion that eighteen boys and girls, selected by whim, listening to a woman recite with no conviction and no charm ...”

“... Instead, I was truthful, and told her it was as if I was living in that terrible movie Regarding Henry, in which Harrison Ford gets shot in the head during a convenience-store hold-up and afterwards becomes a mental child and can no longer make love to his wife. I used to be able to do this; I know I used to be able to do this. I used to be able to make love ...”