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“... It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.             Henry James, Life of Hawthorne But, first of all, is there a history of silence?    Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Literary history? Can there still be people who believe in it – or them: literature, history, literary history? Are not all texts on the same level, just texts? Is history not something synchronic, merely a different way of talking about language? The views implied by these rhetorical questions seem wrong to many people, myself included ...”

“... the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and ...”

“... Heaney didn’t feature in the first version of Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage (1974), Clive James’s satire on British literary life; but in the ‘improved version’, just two years later, he has become a fixture of the scene, ‘SEAMUS FEAMUS’, pictured tucking into a pub lunch of ‘two slabs of peat around a conger eel’ (‘Clive was very ...”

“... The spirit is sometimes called Structuralism, sometimes Deconstruction or Post-Structuralism. James Gribble’s book is a call to action: the teaching of literature, he argues, should be based upon the centrality of literary criticism. Literary criticism is ‘that form of discourse which undertakes the analysis of works of literature so as to do justice ...”

“... more generally on the ‘new transgressive criticism’ produced by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked transgressions but rather ...”

“... found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew ...”

“... to explore ‘an exciting frontier for reading and research’. Recently, the geologist Gifford Miller and his team at the University of Colorado-Boulder have argued that the Little Ice Age had two phases, 1275-1300 and 1430-55. In the first of these, volcanoes blasted dust and sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, which respectively blocked and bounced ...”

“... a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to ...”

“... narrative. Yet if you require a novel to be one entire and perfect chrysolite in the Henry James manner, Durrell is a non-starter. His fiction is made up of wildly different elements which there is no attempt to harmonise. He has ebullient moods and phases, and he wants to get them all in. There are the great descriptive set-pieces, often motivated by ...”

“... of people who worked outside – and against – official Government policy. Chief among them was James Guerin, a Bible-thumping chorister-entrepreneur from Connecticut, who made a fortune by flouting his Government’s policy on arm sales – especially to South Africa and Iraq. When he was short of money in 1987, Guerin came to Britain and tricked one of ...”

“... domini regis. What did they pay Chaucer for? Why was he so useful? Is there any clue to his James Bond activities in his poetry? At any rate it is a pleasure to have a literary subject who appears to have been taken seriously in his own lifetime, to have had a role in the great world. No wonder, then, that Chaucer’s biographers have been so ready to ...”

“... Abrahamus Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their ...”

“... worked for Marilyn, by her housekeeper Eunice Murray, her cleaner Lena Pepit-one, by a fan called James Haspiel who used to stand outside her apartment, by one or two guys who slept with her, by any numbers of guys who wanted to sleep with her, and by a tittle-tattle lifeguard at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Her half-sister Bernice Miracle wrote a ...”

“... postman picking his way through the rubble lining Frankfurt’s city hall. In Munich, Lee Miller was photographed soaping herself in Hitler’s bath. Walter Sanders caught the wife and daughter of an American soldier drinking tea in a luxurious dining car, looking out at the train next to them, in which DPs were squashed into boxcars. Sollors has ...”

“... men and women. Well, Forman may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the penchant for adultery of Elizabethan wives. And just as Rowse’s speculations about Emilia Bassano were not ...”