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“... or two is a cheap price for the privilege of an interview. And it is always the best to be quite frank about your position with such people. You could have said, in order to make conversation: ‘My father has always looked upon you as one of the greatest minds of modern India. He has often said he never understood Hinduism so well as when he read your ...”

“... you now is like/seeing a god or a king/naked and starving in a field,’ the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote in ‘Monk Automaton, c.1560’ (2021), an ode to the machine. But clothed and activated the monk becomes uncanny, even whimsical. When placed on a table it traces the path of a seven-pointed shape. With its head turning left to right, and its eyes ...”

“... In an obituary note written after she finally succumbed to colon cancer in 1897, Henry James paid characteristically equivocal tribute to this most prolific of women writers: ‘from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious treatment.’ His obituary hovered between contempt for helpless female fecundity ...”

“... both sides know the game. And as the form becomes more self-conscious, the writer – Henry James is the obvious example – indicates both inside and outside his novel how the reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our ...”

“... Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in 1959, had sold over five million books. The private eye was the wilderness hero moved to the urban frontier, alone and unattached, living ...”

“... passing through its human engineering. That was the feeling in 1993 when the Merseyside toddler James Bulger was taken from the Strand Shopping Centre, as if the building itself was guilty of some terrible anomie. If you liked malls as much as I did as a teenager – Rivergate Mall in Irvine New Town, eat your heart out, and the shopping centre in the ...”

“... have the idea that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s ...”

“... new walk, Olivier was so afraid of being left alone with the audience during the soliloquies that Frank Finlay (Iago) stayed in the wings where Olivier could see him. Yet, after the early years of massive putty jobs, he had learned by 1949 that a tiny change could provide a disguise: ‘I hit on the practical notion that ... by changing one feature one can ...”

“... propriety which a master of the genre can manipulate to reveal everything that lies beneath. Henry James and Ivy Compton-Burnett knew exactly how to do this, and they were the exceptions in not complaining of the censorship to which they were subjected by the standards of the philistine bourgeoisie. The writer who offers his own version of a proper, placid and ...”

“... na Gile’ (‘Brightness Most Bright’), which defeated Mangan in the 19th century, and Frank O’Connor in the 20th, doesn’t prove manipulable by Thomas Kinsella either – but all are of the utmost interest and signficance in denoting the cultural resources of the unregenerate Irish. As literature in Irish dwindled virtually to a handful of ...”

“... its use of ‘Britain’ for ‘England’ – a usage only firmly validated by the accession of James I in 1603. ‘Every man that stood/Show’d like a mine’ is also very tight, and the passage about the heavily adorned women (‘madams’, perhaps in scorn for the French) takes some unravelling. Wearing heavy finery was hard work for these women, unused ...”

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

“... the effect is of a Babel of voices talking brilliantly/derangedly. Here, for instance, is James Axton, narrator of The Names: Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to the travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how ...”

“... totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been signed by Rice on the day before he died. When James A. Baker, a Texas lawyer whose firm had represented Rice for many years and who had drawn up his will in 1896, arrived in New York, he went to Rice’s Madison Avenue apartment, where he met Patrick. ‘I suppose you are surprised to find me in ...”

“... the people in the end is not a being but a theory’. The book has a cast of thousands: William James, Théodore Flournoy, Morton Prince (who failed to detect sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own ...”