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“... return, which I do not see as any kind of ‘come-back’, but as a new departure, maybe I should lay out the reasons for that long absence and silence in the English-language field. My first books came out in London (from Cape) in 1966: Letters from Gourgounel (prose) and The Cold Wind of Dawn (poems). A year after the reviews appeared, I had left ...”

“... Street. Since Tony Gray does not tell us a great deal about this novel, it seemed a good idea to lay aside, temporarily, his amused and amusing book and plunge into Moore’s extraordinary tale of the wicked, wicked world of wet-nursing, the reality behind those advertisements in the personal column of the Times: ‘A good breast of milk ...”

“... and disagreement with the author. The thesis is simple enough. Pacelli was born into a caste of lay Vatican lawyers who had served the Popes since 1819. He was never a normal boy – but godly, smug, effeminate, delicate and priggish, captivated by the ethic and romance of asceticism. Solitary and highly strung, he was ‘born a priest’ and ordained at ...”

“... along with the wonderful Schreber.’ Freud is here referring to the famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of his nervous illness had appeared in 1903, and constitute one of the most celebrated case-studies of paranoia in the literature. The letter of 1910 to Jung goes on: ‘Schreber, who ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry ...”

“... death while dancing and singing a Sabbath table song. At this stage, however, the real problem lay not with the peasant masses but with a military leadership brutalised and corrupted by its experiences in the Russian army. It was in this institutionally antisemitic environment that the religious prejudices officers and soldiers had imbibed in their ...”

“... up, there was only one name for the fifth of November: ‘Bonfire Night’. Much of the excitement lay in anticipation, which gained momentum in the last week of October, brushing confidently past Halloween, not yet the extravagant rite of autumn it has become. Like all memories, this flies back as a scatter of images: pestering Dad for an old shirt and ...”

“... How could anyone think that his soul was now flying off to an eternal judgment? There he lay, in his frailty and banality, his body the register, the lined book, of his 79 years. The corpse was so palpable in its morbidity, so finished. But for centuries, people believed the book would be opened again. In a late 15th-century mural in Albi ...”

“... but also knocked about and threatened. The difference between this and his subsequent Moscow story lay in the alleged perpetrators of his kidnapping. This time they were not British or Italian intelligence agents but what Bitov described as ‘White Guards’. This is Soviet shorthand for politically active Russian émigrés, and it usually refers to an ...”

“... could live in a suburban semi with round-cornered bays and a tiled roof – but believe the future lay with blocks of workers’ flats; accept that a new world should be built, while taking only tentative steps towards transforming their own environment. There are sections of this exhibition which show where their radio programmes were broadcast from, what ...”

“... must not prejudice their claim.) But Labor has never been far behind the Coalition. In the 1990s Paul Keating’s administration introduced mandatory detention for anyone entering Australia without a valid visa. In 2012, during Julia Gillard’s tenure, it emerged that the security services had ruled against the release of more than fifty asylum seekers on ...”

“... too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and Paul Auster sent between July 2008 – a month after Kannemeyer’s approach – and August 2011. This extraordinary book comes with no explanations other than the flap copy: Although Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had been ...”

“... be present, she said, even in the first year of life. It also meant that the origins of neurosis lay very early in life, and were due not to a fixation at one of the earlier stages of development, but rather to a failure to reach a certain level of mastery of the complex world of object relations. Two crucial levels of mastery could be distinguished – what ...”

“... were to produce song-cycles from A Shropshire Lad, as did John Ireland. The appeal of the poems lay partly in their concision and surface simplicity of rhythm and metre, their lack of figurative recesses, their closed forms and antiphonal structure, their balladry. Housman was more interested in traditional ballads and, like Eliot, in music hall, than in ...”

“... to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves. Paul Richards is a veteran British anthropologist whose special interest is the rainforest peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia: groups which have spent most of the Nineties in apparently fruitless pestering or killing of themselves and their neighbours. Richards ...”

“... to have founded Thebes at the direction of the Delphic oracle, on the spot where a particular cow lay down to rest. That spot became known as the Cadmea, the high ground of Thebes. The city walls had seven gates, at which its seven mythic attackers perished. New walls were built later, enclosing a much larger area, and the Cadmea became for Thebes what the ...”