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“... expanded and contracted. The mouth said to him: maybe it’s not your fault, maybe Elizabeth made love with someone while you were away and got a disease and gave it to you. I’d forgive her, he thought. I really would forgive her. Supposing the stain were the discharge of an infectious disease, if he put his underpants in the hamper, they could infect all ...”

“... One way to think of Harold Bloom is as a professor and scholar of Romantic poetry who has Romantic aspirations of his own. He writes in the passionate style of Emerson and Shelley, and he has a penchant like Blake’s for system-building. Bloom would subscribe to that poet’s declaration in Jerusalem that his business isn’t to reason and compare, but to create ...”

“... is always decided on the side of life.Craxton came from a large family, one of the six children of Harold and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed ...”

“... Juan.) Contemporary readers admired the force and intensity of Byron’s narrative poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the ‘eastern’ tales that followed it, and the heavyweight classical tragedies he produced in the early 1820s. They tended either to disparage or ignore the work of which he was proudest, but he was right to predict that, ‘by and ...”

“... wrote Alfred Döblin as he steamed out of New York. ‘You were not very fond of me./But I love you still.’ Others laboured on projects that would see the light of day much later, Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung, written in the States, was published only in 1959. The classic work of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of ...”

“... In​ 1971, an elderly bookseller in Berkshire, Harold Edwards, began writing to the Aidov family in Moldavia. Slava Aidov was serving time in Dubravlag, a Soviet camp for political prisoners, and his wife, Lera, isolated and lonely, seized on the connection with Harold. Their correspondence continued for fifteen years ...”

“... Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love.’ On Sunday 27 January André Gide, also in Algiers, was, according to his own account, checking out of the Grand Hôtel d’Orient when he saw the names ‘Oscar Wilde’ and ‘Alfred Douglas’ on the slate on which guests’ names were written. Theirs ...”

“... to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, or love-songs, a merit so incessant; that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers. Emerson catches the precise way in which Shakespeare’s difference in degree from all other writers becomes a difference in kind. ‘We are still out of ...”

“... involved ‘the Doctor, the Lord, the Spy’ and Profumo himself. The leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, dubbed them ‘this dingy quadrilateral’, though, as will soon appear, a much dingier quadrilateral was composed of four very different people. The origins of the Profumo family were Sardinian. Jack Profumo’s great-grandfather, who had, the ...”

“... and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, announcing, ‘I have never been able to understand how that thing works,’ and then slowly realising all the magical tricks this little rubbery object could do when suitably inspired? (‘She grasped the animal under study without ...”

“... Macmillan” has not been made prime minister,’ the chairman corrected her. ‘ “Mr Harold” has.’ Here, in a nutshell, is the theme of Richard Davenport-Hines’s book. Its early chapters form a heroic chronicle of upward social mobility. We first encounter an earlier Daniel Macmillan as a mid 18th-century crofter, scratching a living from ...”

“... Poet’ in 1980 or 1981, intending it to form part of a group portrait of the writers published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury. In the event, however, she wrote a biography of Charlotte Mew, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which was published, and reviewed in the LRB in 1984 – and will be reissued this summer.In 1927 Charlotte Mew was 58 ...”

“... an example of the unassimilable foreignness of their lives to mine. An entire generation fell in love with Buck: they made her dozens of books international bestsellers and gave her the Nobel Prize. No writer was more often translated or, while she lived, more admired. No writer since Marco Polo has done more to shape how the West thinks about China. ‘What ...”

“... life is what Rayner Heppenstall has looked for in fiction. In The Blaze of Noon the reality is love, as it is celebrated by a blind masseur and a girl named Sophie Madron: I touched her lips to stop her talking. And I lifted her to her feet until she was quiet and her eyes full of tears ... It was a love gentle and ...”

“... would insist on it. The investigations carried out in his three novels – Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? (2012), In the Absence of Absalon (2017) and After Absalon (2020) – are nothing if not assiduous. But the trilogy isn’t so much crime fiction, or even spoof crime fiction, as an absurdist comedy about overthinking, or over-and-above ...”