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“... Pound always rather prided himself on being ‘out of key with his time’, to quote from the first line of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, and in his letter to Tessimond observes that the young poet ‘must be very much out of the world to have invoked me … from oltre tomba’. Tessimond’s neglect, both in his lifetime and since, is generally put down ...”

“... On 15 December 2022, Harvard announced that Gay would become its thirtieth president, the first black person to occupy the top post in the university’s nearly 400-year history. At the end of September last year, she was inaugurated to great fanfare. A week later, on 7 October, Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1200 people and seizing 240 ...”

“... as well as with the actual 20th-century country where she mostly lived. And yet she wrote in her first language, English, and didn’t think of herself as Italian. She went to live in Fiesole, in the hills above Florence, after her father’s early death from tuberculosis in 1912, when she was seven years old; her father’s family were American, wealthy ...”

“... a respected Jewish family in Copenhagen, she had been left motherless at 15 and made a disastrous first marriage which broke up almost at once. Some years later, well after the disappearance of this first husband, she found herself pregnant, which is where the mystery of Erikson’s birth came in, the crux of his life and ...”

“... Glasgow, where the Better Together foot soldiers had gathered to watch the results. From the very first declaration – the bellwether county of Clackmannanshire – it was clear their side had won. Drinks flowed. There was a curry. There were speeches. By 6 a.m. there was dancing. As a journalist, and as a Yes supporter, I would rather have been with the ...”

“... barons into taking a wife, he shocks them by choosing Griselda, a poor but virtuous peasant. At first this unexpected union seems to confirm his wisdom. Walter has selected a bride who proves to be not only beautiful and humble, but outstanding in prudence and politically skilled. But there is a catch. Before tying the knot, he asks Griselda to swear ...”

“... out, leaving only the cavity’ – was still in existence when the novel was published in 1963. Ruth Glass’s coinage was contemporary: ‘gentrification’ described a peripheral phenomenon that was, at that time, far from a demographic shift. It was a fashion in its infancy, so diffuse and various that it had failed to register with less eagle-eyed ...”

“... the darkness by his art. As Rilke, another beneficiary of Wittgenstein’s largesse, was among the first to recognise, Trakl’s verse ‘encircled’ the trauma of modernity. But it was not just what Trakl said that mattered, it was how he captured the unsayable. As Rilke notes, Trakl’s longest poem, ‘Helian’, revolves around its silences: The rise and ...”

“... suburb of Zehlendorf – her family belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia; they were Germans first, Jews second. Their father, Robert, was a statistician, president of the Berlin Stock Exchange and owner of the largest private library in Germany. Like his son years later in London, Robert Kuczynski knew many prominent left-wingers, including Karl ...”

“... last season Covent Garden presented only one opera written since the outbreak of the First World War, and the number of new works since 1945 which have survived in the international repertory can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What is it in our social psychology that feels obliged, or inclined, to maintain this chronically ...”

“... denunciations has (mostly) lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last ...”

“... trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a ...”

“... back towards a Germany where already 4.5 million people were out of work, the Nazi Party for the first time faced the fact that it might be elected to government. ‘Finance capitalism’, which they had been lambasting for 12 years, had got the country into just the mess they had predicted. How to get out of it? In two years two million jobs had been ...”

“... reminds the reader that many critics have found it an exhausted subject that should be put aside. Ruth Nevo, for example, in 1972 dismissed the question as ‘misconceived’. Jenkins isn’t so dismissive, but he does say one very odd thing, which I imagine others have pointed out: in the second footnote on page 137, he says that the word delay is ‘never ...”

“... biologists moved to counter his arguments with science as well as political opposition. But the first real fight came with the publication in 1975 of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which claimed that a new evolutionary synthesis would reduce the social to the biological, entrenching women’s position. Feminist biologists responded in a special issue of the ...”