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“... scientists investigating the Atlantis Massif along the mid-Atlantic ridge. When it appeared in the frame of their remotely controlled camera – named Argo – there was, by all accounts, a certain degree of excitement. The Lost City consisted of a field of white towers: hydrothermal vents, populated by tiny see-through creatures. So did this mean that Plato ...”

“... practices as osteopathy, chiropractic and Christian Science. The Continental alienists, Charcot, Janet and Freud, suggested that the syndrome need not be produced by true physical traumas: psychological wounds were sufficient. It is therefore appropriate that Freud’s heuristic theory of the dynamic unconscious should dominate the study of traumatic memory ...”

“... his final version of the poem, or the man-centred, poet-centred, mawkish, petulant and uncertain frame of mind in which he undertook to write the story at all. On the whole, critics seem happier with the fully exposed and censurable product that can be read as a symptom of something. To suppress the symptom by revising the work is to pass from bad poetry to ...”

“... to be said. I watch this story shut down around her, clamping her writing into its hollow wooden frame. Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.According to Freud, the act of suicide always involves more than one person. Maybe that is one reason why suicide is classified as a ...”

“... a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall. To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame and angrily erased my signature, before recommencing hostilities. In a way, the treaty has remained broken ever ...”

“... and the more she cares about her subject, the more she can tell – the worse the story sounds. Janet Todd has been a champion of Wollstonecraft for the length of her scholarly career. Unsurprisingly, she has taken exception to works that treat her with less respect than Todd believes her to have deserved. When Claire Tomalin’s biography appeared (one of ...”

“... down to killing someone.’One of the shorter pieces in the collection is Carrère’s review of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1989). He admires the way Malcolm exposes the games writers play to entrap their subjects. But he has one objection: his own innocence. ‘At the risk of transforming this review into a plea on my own behalf, I ...”

“... Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth) and the fictionalised portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry – it may feel at times as if we’ve made this expedition before, with Claire Bloom hovering overhead.But buoyancy ...”

“... bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from time to time where the edge of the frame is. He explains he wants me to seem to sit on the branch but actually to lean forward into the camera at the same time. I try.‘You’re game,’ says Julie Kavanagh of the New Yorker.Actually I’m not game at all, just timid; and, short of taking my ...”

“... and causes of madness were directly legible in the physiognomies of the insane – although, as Janet Browne points out in her account of Charles Darwin’s encounter with this approach, it seems that what the psychiatrist could see in the photographs of madmen was simply not visible to the layman.) This separation means that even if we acknowledge the ...”

“... efforts of the craftsmen hired to erect the new building on the Bankside: Raising the Globe’s frame could only take place after the foundation work was completed. The late cold spell brought frost, and frost was the bane of labourers who had to break through the foot or so of frozen ground to excavate the foundation and prevent frost heave before sinking ...”

“... centre). Did the devil paint the picture, as Norman Mailer might have it, while God supplied the frame (or, since Mailer’s eschatology is not easy to decipher, was it the other way around)? Mailer, too, is having a love affair with America, but unsurprisingly he is entirely up-front about its ambivalent character. Introducing half a century of his writing ...”

“... original? The answer lies not least with the actors: Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn are no match for Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. Haneke’s American remake of Funny Games, even closer to the original movie in story and shot arrangement, is also inferior, and again the actors are a primary reason. The villains aren’t quite right in their social ...”

“... words, one of those rare beings, as likeable as he was impressive.’ To Darwin’s biographer Janet Browne, Darwin was ‘basically a good man, humble and kind, and always did his best to act according to the traditional values he had learned as a child’. ‘It was his very ordinariness,’ she writes, ‘that captivated people expecting to meet a ...”