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“... you have done her and regret for any inconvenience she may have caused you, together with the hope that the butter proved to be to your taste.’ One understands why Rousseau should have written such a letter in response to an incident that was highly appropriate to his most recent publication. But typically, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Madame ...”

“... for the poetic abstracted from vulgar congregational performance – he likes John Byrom and Christopher Smart, whose greatest successes, as Davie sees it, were not pointed towards the actual singing of current congregations. Some poems which have been highly successful as sung works in congregations – of the past and sometimes of the present – seem ...”

“... in a cheap hotel, then sublet the art historian Lucy Lippard’s loft, a 15-minute walk from Christopher Street, the new hub of gay life after Stonewall. One night at the International Stud he ran into the young August Kleinzahler – out on a bar crawl with his gay older brother – who later described him as ‘a tall, handsome-looking galoot in a ...”

“... concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high yields, mon vieux.’ Christopher Reid, the editor of this weighty selection of Heaney’s correspondence, adds disconcertingly: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass”.’ Was it unguarded of Heaney to take such ...”

“... these writers braved a dangerous passage across a social and psychological frontier in the hope of offering their work and their lives to a class that, to them, was a strange and wondrous Other, the image and agent of apocalyptic power. Their border-passages were transgressions. They violated social and artistic tabus. Transgression always evokes pious ...”

“... the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public ...”

“... great practitioner of the art in the last century and in this short, sparkling and committed essay Christopher Hitchens writes in somewhat the same tradition. He is a radical British journalist living in the United States who is married to a Greek Cypriot and has an understanding of and love for this unfortunately-placed island. For him, enjoyment of the great ...”

“... is a pathetic figure. He knows that Marxism is moonshine; but he still nourishes the hope of finding in it a gleam to follow.’ Nearly half a century later he was less dogmatic: Am I a Marxist? People sometimes ask, and – unlike jesting Pilate – stay for an answer which they do not get. I believe that Marx, Darwin and Freud were very great ...”

“... be jiggered if I survive death on Johnston’s terms; I don’t know whether he holds out much hope for himself. And his success won’t please anyone who believes in anything supernatural. Any conception of God as essentially a supernatural being is idolatry in Johnston’s book. All regular adherents of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Islam and ...”

“... what is scientific or scholarly, and what is not so. There is a deeper problem, caused by our very hope that criticism could save us from specialisation, or fragmentation: we have identified it as the re-humanising activity, so when it becomes technical or claims a field of its own – when criticism says, ‘Let us be like other departments of ...”

“... At one point, the narrator tries to find his copy of Kafka’s ‘Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way’ and finally finds the quotation he wants. ‘The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice.’ Isolation has no choice either, but art like Francis Wyndham’s can turn it into a fantasy as innocently moving ...”

“... to their own power of resisting the temporal flux that would otherwise place their sense beyond hope of recovery. Riffaterre admits all kinds of cultural ‘code’ to the deciphering of texts, whether from the visual arts, the clichés of period taste or the repertoire of popular mythology. All this gives his writing great scope and apparent ...”

“... entryists and police informers, though the government took a largely benevolent view: the hope was that the CNT would serve as a counterweight to the socialist unions. Marco, with no particular agenda other than self-aggrandisement, flourished. Old enough to speak the purists’ language and young enough to get along with the posibilistas, he let the ...”

“... understanding. There is no final resting-point of system or structure whereby the theorist might hope to escape this unsettling predicament. Semiotics is the discipline best-equipped to show that such claims are self-defeating, in so far as they ignore the productive open-endedness of meaning and the non-availability of ultimate explanations.One could say ...”

“... a man who doesn’t want the child his wife is pregnant with, was published here last year in Christopher Middleton’s translation.* More recently, PN Review published Gert Hofmann’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, a short story translated by his son, about the return of a poet to his father’s house: the son begs the father for ...”