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“... would conventionally deny them that are the most revealing. This was the impulse that propelled Quentin Crisp, ‘blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick’, through the ‘dim streets of Pimlico’. ‘Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep that it completely obscured the way ahead,’ he recalls. ‘This hardly mattered. There were always others to look ...”

“... self-portraits but by photographs of her delicately Surrealist sculptural assemblages under glass bell-jars. Such displacements, whether on the part of curators or artists themselves, might seem timid, but they have the fortunate effect of posing the question, more frankly than the Victorian male nudes, what a queer aesthetic might look like, as distinct from ...”

“... but at a loss to know what to do. ‘The more I think of it,’ the newly married Vanessa Bell wrote, ‘the more it seems to me absurd that we should have … 5 servants to look after a young & able-bodied couple & a baby.’ ‘Why we have them I can’t think,’ Virginia lamented. ‘How terrible it is to be in this position.’ At the same time ...”

“... may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that ...”

“... some ultimate nature, everything that is life-giving and authentic.’ ‘She was just there,’ Quentin says of Maggie, the Marilyn character in After the Fall. ‘She was just there, like a tree or a cat.’ Among other things, this is to rob sex of its history. ‘Imagine my slow disappointment,’ Steffens wrote when he’d been travelling around the ...”

“... nobody has heard of, or cares about, Spring of the Lamb by Douglas Woolf. Sorry? Doesn’t ring a bell. One of the rarest, most delicately obtuse talents lost by America: a skeletal revenant too canny to leave any footprints in the dust. (‘He’s come down from Kellogg or Wallace – Idaho camptowns, feathery silver markets on the far tip of the right ...”

“... war and the causes of war, a theme which was to her a kind of posthumous discussion with Julian Bell about his decision to go to Spain. She suspected his motives and could not find them altogether admirable. Nicolson’s verdict is that ‘she tried to be rational about war, but her emotion got the better of her logic.’ Her arguments about the connections ...”

“... him at his most self-justifying: Maggie (the Monroe character) is crying out for something that Quentin (the Miller figure) can’t easily respond to, not at least in the midst of his great existential derangement of purpose. He does the worst thing possible given her background: he makes her out to be a lunatic. With Strasberg it seems possible that he ...”

“... typescripts and proofs left behind in the apartment he occupied in the family house on the rue Quentin Bauchart. Boxed up and placed in storage in a furniture warehouse, these papers were only disinterred when the removal company itself moved premises in 1989. They now form the Fonds Roussel at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and have recently become ...”

“... in its detail: undergraduates on night fire-watching duty taking turns to stay awake in the bell tower of Christ Church, the smell of blackout curtains, the ominous poetry of the blackout itself, the eight-second interval between trucks in a military convoy, with a press of bicycles behind the last one. This section is written in the first ...”

“... upon the fronded suffocations of the midsummer city. Here the pastiche of Faulkner (from the Quentin chapter of The Sound and the Fury) obscures the attempt at honest praise of the labour of George Gudger. Why did Agee fluff and pamper this conventional theme of the writer as criminal? The enigmatic figure of Edgar had somehow become for him an image of ...”

“... has traditionally been neglected in England. Between the time of Leslie Stephen and, say, Quentin Skinner, that was certainly true. Even today, this branch of studies has far less elbow-room in English than in American universities. Since the Seventies, however, the situation has been changing, and the rise of a new kind of intellectual ...”