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“... Last December​ , in Russia for the first time, I saw a small panel painting in the Hermitage showing The Vision of St Augustine: the saint, in full episcopal fig, is sitting on a riverbank near a child who is scooping up water with a spoon and pouring it into a hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he thinks he’s up to; to which the child replies that he’s trying to empty the sea into the hole ...”

“... following in the region, of a mad and dangerous kind, which requires the crucifixion mainly of small animals, but later of babies and grown-ups too. Llosa’s technique is at full experimental stretch in weaving a convincing tangle out of the luridly coloured threads in this story of two sorts of deep human requirement getting out of hand. He strings ...”

“... in which he protests her superiority to mythical heroines of every stripe, from Andromeda to Helen. However crazy her behaviour, she proceeded always with absolute confidence, brooking neither argument nor delay. Though she caused havoc almost wherever she went, for Graves these conflicts were evidence of her ineffable, otherworldly ...”

“... reviewing, Literaturwissenschaft and Tageskritik, but it is still the case there that a remarkably small number of people, considering the potential size of the public, actually read what the reviewers review, and of those only a few pay much attention to what they read in that line, their notion of an interesting book being different from that of the ...”

“... project slips imperceptibly into a wordy one, and the more wordy the less reliable. Here is a small example of what I mean, from page 15 of Joyce’s Politics. We are told that ‘at the earliest stage of development’, Stephen’s mind is exposed to ‘the Irish world of politics’ in the form of Dante’s two brushes representing Michael Davitt and ...”

“... favoured notion of modern sculpture – in 1926 the New Yorker published a drawing by Helen Hokinson of two toqued ladies circling a Bird in Space, shaping themselves to its undulating line. Sculpture as essence, sculpture as pure form, sculpture as a response to material, the probity of direct carving, the virtues of Egyptian hierarchy and of ...”

“... of epic, in which allusions to heroic fictions at once give sanction to and emphasise the small scale of an individual life, was vital for Heaney’s later work. It enabled what might be called postcolonial parallax, in which a master text of a dominant civilisation is deliberately transformed from the ostentatiously low perspective of an unheroic ...”

“... there for Mozart as well as themselves. Wolfgang and Constanze were short of money and also had a small boy and a newborn baby to look after, but it occurred to them that Leopold, who was already looking after Nannerl’s first-born in Salzburg, might become their childminder as well. Leopold, however, resentful of Wolfgang’s independence since his move to ...”

“... to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He certainly has moments far better than this. ‘Gascoigne’s Lullaby’ is as good a set of ...”

“... own pathos and dim beauty. All three show him as a boy with smooth hair and a neat coat, holding a small bouquet in well-articulated fingers. He is standing next to his seated mother, who wears an enveloping apron and a veil draped around head and neck, her empty hands rendered as two blobs on her lap. Mother and son gaze at us with intense, icon-like black ...”

“... well placed to understand. The flow of working people to the cities had always been matched by a small but steady trickle in the opposite direction of manufacturers made good seeking to clamber onto the lower-upper-class rung of society with the purchase of a country estate. Country houses continued to grow in number as the way of life that was needed to ...”

“... for Sianne Ngai, a critic and theorist with a habit, as she puts it, of hanging large coats on small pegs. Her field of research is the relation between aesthetics and ideology, viewed from a post-Marxist perspective, and she has already made two strikingly original contributions to that field. Ugly Feelings (2005) provides a sweeping yet fine-grained ...”

“... a family as much as with a person, just as E.M. Forster did with the family of Bob Buckingham and Helen Schlegel does with the Wilcoxes in Howards End, thinking she has found a way of life to love, or a lost tribe to which she might belong. Whatever the anxieties, a writer’s style will often enough be a homemade affair, a mesh of material discovered and ...”

“... in 1816, originally as a memorial to his wife Eliza. Above the brick burial vault and within a small precinct bounded by a heavy, classicising balustrade, he placed a tall canopy (almost three metres high) of rough Portland stone, supported on plain square columns and topped by one of his characteristic shallow domes. Inside this canopy was another – a ...”

“... refrain from quoting them to a bewildered congregation. I once sat through a long sermon on the small matter of the ‘lacrimae rerum’. While Bishop Herlihy was very worldly in an Italian way about many issues, his worldliness did not, I think, stretch to a priest under his control wishing to measure the length of twenty boys’ penises. He simply would ...”