“... information. As she remarks, things are always turning up: Otto Gross’s love letters to the young Frieda von Richthofen; evidence of Lawrence’s un-incandescent affair with Rosalind Baynes (extravagantly described by Maddox as ‘a return to endogamy’, ‘the choice of a deeply English woman, rather than a foreigner, as a love object’); above ...”

“... I recall this event from over thirty years ago with peculiar vividness. There are lots of young people for whom Wittgenstein’s simple but sculpted sentences are tremendously charged. Pears tells us, in a characteristically more distanced and impersonal way, that he was one of that number, long ago taken by Tractatus, even if he understood hardly a ...”

“... to an age in which the notion of a radical mass movement has become, not least for those too young to remember one, a contradiction in terms. Davenport-Hines sees the Post-Modern as the latest resurgence of Gothic – a self-confirming case to some extent, since he tends to read the latter in terms of the former. But he has a point even so. The speech of ...”

“... was heavily promoted by the Rockefellers (Nelson, Governor of New York, and his brother David, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank), partly because it promised to raise real estate values and create new office space by displacing hundreds of small enterprises. Meanwhile, the Port of New York Authority rebuilt the docks across the Hudson River while ...”

“... of men congratulating one another. Deven meets two wives of the poet Nur. One of them is quite young in spirit: she is regarded as a low-class girl whom the great poet picked up once; she counters this by making her birthday a festival, dressing up and reciting her own verse – but Deven and the other men do not want to hear her. Deven cannot get his ...”

“... but it would be more accurate to describe him as the ‘evil genius’ of his brother-in-law David Séchard, printer, inventor, mere technician and thus true man of the 19th century, who pays dearly for being over-impressed by Lucien’s intellectuality. ‘His fatal, innocent error is to suppose that Lucien’s lofty gift is superior to his modst ...”

“... multiple cuts, as indeed are other subjects. The deepest cut is the freezing of posts: it keeps young scholars out of academic life, thus inducing an atmosphere of stagnation, and it results in morale-destroying lacunae at the senior level. Consequently, there are now departments with no very junior people and no professors. The government may have set out ...”

“... is instructive to compare it with that masterpiece of invention, Larkin’s poem on looking at a young girl’s photograph album.’ The comparison isn’t made, so the instruction is hypothetical, but Bayley’s general patience is clarified by what it has to put up with in Ashbery’s Shadow Train. Bayley has defended his criteria in several other ...”

“... and inequality were imposed by law in many American states. Nowadays it is far more common to find young white Americans amazed at the frequency with which crudely racist remarks are made by white British people. This is one example among many in the book where information, true in itself but incomplete, is adduced to develop a false argument. Another ...”

“... Clennell Wilkinson, the pompous and plagiaristic Ellis Roberts. And there were writers who, like David Garnett, simply couldn’t manage the world of journalistic deadlines. Today, leftish journals face an ever-widening gulf between the concerns of ‘cultural politics’ and the day-to-day agenda of professional politicians, which remains overwhelmingly ...”

“... radicals attempted to bridge the gap. Something like an ‘indigenous’ movement sprang up as young intellectuals came increasingly to understand the importance of Peru’s cultural duality. José Carlos Mariategui, who in 1930 founded the Socialist Party and whose thought has been an important influence on Sendero, mixed his highly theoretical Marxism ...”

“... de Man toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a ...”

“... William Hunter and illustrated with copperplate engravings. In 1751, Hunter acquired the body of a young girl who died suddenly in the ninth month of pregnancy. (Most of the corpses available for dissection purposes belonged to criminals, and since pregnant women weren’t hanged it was rare to gain access to their dead bodies.) The woman’s legs have been ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:Wild rumours circulated about this seminar. It was said ...”