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“... playhouses were probably closed two-thirds of the time. Biographers, notably Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate, have struggled to determine the impact plague had on Shakespeare’s life and work. Did Shakespeare flee London during extended outbreaks, and so spend much of the first decade of the 17th century with his family in Stratford? Did he ...”

“... unsupported, cantilevered over empty space.This is not the long sentence as practised by James, Proust or Mann. Their sentences were magnificently terraced earthworks, but Melchor’s are more like slow-motion mudslides. There’s no question of any surprise, a sting in the tail, the equivalent of Columbo’s ‘One more thing …’ The refusal of ...”

“... included it on its list of Christmas picks. Other reviews deprecated the obvious influence of James and Wharton, among others. It would be easier to accept any or all of these assessments – Bevel’s outrage at a scurrilous portrait, praise for literary quality, reservations about originality – if the novel hadn’t supposedly been printed in full as ...”

“... short is that quite modestly substantial ones (by the standards of Alice Munro, let alone Henry James) come to seem monumental. Two of these longer pieces, not widely separated in the book, make claim to some sort of symmetry with their titles (‘The Cows’ and ‘The Seals’), when in fact they represent opposite extremes of Davis’s dealings in ...”

“... looking at the portraits close to for such details – all the time keeping in mind things Rica Jones and Martin Postle explain in their catalogue essay, ‘Gainsborough in His Painting Room’.* For example, that he said he could not ‘without taking away the likeness’ touch a portrait ‘unless from the life’; the report from Ozias Humphry, who ...”

“... favoured funds are able to charge even more: Renaissance Technologies, founded by a mathematician, James Simons, and based in East Setauket on Long Island’s affluent north shore, is reported to charge investors in its Medallion Fund a 5 per cent management fee and a 44 per cent performance fee, though I haven’t been able to confirm those figures. To stop ...”

“... Buck and his wife, Blanche, and various friends and associates (Ralph Fults, Henry Methvin, W.D. Jones) – was intensely family-minded. When they wanted to arrange a family gathering, Clyde and Bonnie would drive past the old Barrow home in West Dallas and toss out Coke bottles in which he’d stuffed messages indicating when and where to meet. Clyde’s ...”

“... two most substantial essays: Francis Huxley’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, Hugh Lloyd-Jones on ‘The Study of the Ancient World’. Doubtless Huxley will hate being called ‘substantial’: his style is busily flash. But he packs in more information, line by line, than any other contributor, and you finish his lecture with an enlarged sense of ...”

“... James Joyce​ resented the Second World War for distracting readers from the newly published Finnegans Wake, and what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less ...”

“... considerations of a less starkly ultimate kind might arise in connection with the subtitle of James Knowlson’s new biography: ‘The Life of Samuel Beckett’. (The main title looks suspiciously like a publisher’s wheeze, a low-grade spin on Beckett’s desperate formula for the modern artist as doomed to fail or, more tantalisingly, as driven by a ...”

“... should be finally discredited. Writing about the centenary of the Fabian Society, Gareth Stedman Jones recently made the simple yet profound observation that ‘in no other country is it easy to imagine a socialist association able to celebrate a hundred years of continuous existence’ and suggested that this achievement ‘owes as much to the stability and ...”

“... her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the same way he recommends students to try a James Bond novel. All the same, H.P. Lovecraft – with his fatuous ghoulishness, revived and found modish in the 1970s – brings his influence to bear on the seventh chapter. The female students are cute and dinky, with their bright-coloured, tasteless food and ...”

“... the efforts of Sisson and his friends to make the parsons use the 1662 Prayer Book and the King James Bible; but I am too ‘broad-church’ to want to throw out all the modern versions. They make you think, when you might have been lulled by the old music. For instance, on the ninth Sunday after Trinity, a churchgoer may hear the parson read: ‘Let your ...”

“... of all three of the Sitwell siblings in Yourcenar’s memoirs, also perhaps a touch of M.R. James: there is always something eerie about her evocation of past facts and probabilities. Her narrative reads like the sober preamble to an unsettling ghost story, a sceptical intelligence pressing on with reasoned discourse, while half-aware of flickering ...”

“... he wasn’t yet ready for the uncertainties of grown-up fiction. The answer lay, at first, in the James Bond stories, swapped and stolen among the boys at his boarding school. There were other ‘occasional hits’, but his search for a book he wanted to read reminded him of Marie Curie isolating ‘one gleaming gramme of radium’ from ‘tonne after tonne ...”