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“... mundane matters, such as James’s relations with the literary market; and here the artist’s patience was evidently not inexhaustible. A 1909 letter to his agent, James Brand Pinker, reads in full: ‘I am greatly obliged to you for what you have done, with Putnam, for the “Bench of Desolation”, & am quite content, as a pis aller, with the £75. But ...”

“... her which begins, ‘Long night succeeds thy little day;/O blighted blossom! can it be/That this gray stone and grassy clay/Have closed our anxious care of thee?’ The vicar of Shepperton church, where she was buried, objected to the first line because it made no provision for immortal life; he and Peacock quarrelled bitterly over it. Jane went mad with ...”

“... journeys in stagecoaches, carriages, even on horseback. Where did they gather the strength and the patience for so many hardships? Why hadn’t they sooner chosen to stay home? I had dozed and yawned. The conductor prodded my shoulder. We had arrived in Paris. I felt my breast pocket, where I kept my passport and the ship’s ticket, and the trouser back ...”

“... to reinforce Leavis’s right to be called a major critic. To paraphrase Johnson’s remark on Gray and his ‘Elegy’, had he always written like this, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him. Critical commentary of this kind usually had its origin in the classroom. It was essential to Leavis’s project that he should be at the charismatic ...”

“... to be a rock in anybody’s idea of a stream. He incorporates ‘change’ and opportunity. Jim Gray, an engineer, recognised the moment when it came. If he was to reach the peak, he would have to abandon that long-haired ex-sailor with Vietnam patches on his sleeves, leaving him to die in the snow: ‘He could no longer be the same old Jim ...”

“... been apart, my brother seemed to have aged. The hair surrounding his bald skull had grown nearly gray. Zygmunt Salkin had a head of curly brown hair. He wore a blue suit with red stripes, a shirt of a similar pattern and a gaudy tie. He spoke an old-home Yiddish without the English words employed by the American tourists I had encountered in Warsaw. Still, I ...”

“... was inseparable from his great achievement, but it made living with him a constant exercise in patience and flexibility. Whether or not ‘change is … the most imperative of human needs,’ as he later suggested to a young woman with whom he was sufficiently intimate to arouse his wife’s jealousy, there is no question that changeableness was the very ...”

“... House had been dictated by Roth’s Connecticut neighbour and flouncy nemesis Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of ...”

“... When an American newspaper disparaged her pet, Lord Tod Wadley, as ‘an absurd manikin’, her patience ran out.Escape came dramatically. In 1933 Carstairs spotted an advertisement for Whale Cay, a tiny island in the British West Indies thirty miles north-west of Nassau and ninety miles east of Miami. After visiting and chatting with its two residents ...”

“... and in numerous other small ways helping Stone to deliver his novels before his editors lost patience.‘Bob once said, Kesey goes for life, but I’m going for art,’ Janice told Bell. ‘And I thought he made exactly the right decision, because all those great nights of back and forth, you know, they disappeared into the ether.’ She was speaking of ...”

“... simple truths about literature and life that were being overlooked. There is a famous page about Gray’s ‘Elegy’ at the beginning of Some Versions of Pastoral which shows how the cleverness and the simplicity worked together. Commenting on the stanza beginning ‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene ...’ he points out that it means 18th-century ...”

“... essence this is the best defence that could be offered. Reviewing books by Erich Heller and Ronald Gray, he remarks that both authors ‘too readily call “German” a general feature of the romantic and post-romantic intellect’, just as he had done himself.The most intense of these speculations concern Mallarmé and Hölderlin, whose question wozu Dichter ...”

“... his writing would not have petered out when it did. For all that, it’s a sad read and Motion’s patience with his subject is often hard to match. Larkin being Larkin, though, there are lots of laughs and jokes never far away. Before he became a celebrity (and wriggle though he did that was what he became) and one heard gossip about Larkin it was generally ...”