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“... Until recently, the art of modern biography was too little influenced by the man who invented it, James Boswell, and, even today, many of those who set out to write the lives of authors seem to be led by a suspicion that everything of interest about the subject might already have been said by the subject himself. The literary biographer is haunted by Nabokov’s stylishly defensive comment that the only biography of a writer that matters is the biography of his style ...”

“... horrific realities of everyday life in a Nazi-conquered Britain (this found form as a novella, I, James Blunt). And in the summer of 1940 he wrote an article for Country Life entitled ‘The New “Merry England”’, in which he describes the invigorating camaraderie of Binsted, his home village, where he was the commander of the Local Defence ...”

“... saw some of the effects of this ‘harmonisation’ at close hand. On 1 January 1992, the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, both of whom died in 1941, came out of copyright. I was working at Penguin at the time, and my colleagues had commissioned Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics editions of both writers, with a feminist twist to the Woolf editions and ...”

“... her by starting a relationship with her sister Frieda. (Frieda’s next husband but one was D.H. Lawrence.) Marianne and Else were at Weber’s bedside together when he died, aged 56, in 1920. Marianne died in Else’s arms at 84 in 1954. Mina died in her arms at 87 in 1967. Else herself lived to 99 and died in 1973, in the same home in Heidelberg as the ...”

“... of Kansas by pro-slavery forces, which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town of Lawrence, but ridiculed Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in unusually personal terms, alluding to his speech impediment. ‘He shows an incapacity of accuracy,’ Sumner declared. ‘He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.’ Brooks was ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... and ‘popular’ literature became even more marked: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence,’ the publisher Michael Joseph observed in 1925, ‘there are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’ And if we look further forward into the interwar period, the peaks of the popular ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... accents’. Home is a place with a dialect and tradition. Sometimes writers, whether James Macpherson or T. S. Eliot, attempt to make up a tradition which stands in lieu of home. A tradition isn’t just an academic’s card index, it can also be a writer’s life-support-system; writing is usually a solitary activity, but encouragement and ...”

“... decapitated, precariously-perched, red-bonneted, tearful face of his political adversary Charles James Fox. The allegorical figures of traditional political and moral satire, like the productions of pornography, are not given distinctive individuating marks. So Newton’s Napoleon looks less like the Bonaparte we now all know than does Garretto’s ...”

“... the later Victorian rhetoric of death scenery, through Modernist modulations in Conrad, Forster, Lawrence (a romantic throwback) and Woolf, to a conclusion in the Post-Modernist and supra-national fictions of Beckett, Pynchon and Nabokov. The strongest element in Death Sentences, as in Stewart’s earlier Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, are the close ...”

“... to its code. This allegiance also cut them off from the giants of British Modernism – Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Pound, Eliot – all of whom chose to distance themselves from the war effort. One of Lehmann’s major themes is this profound isolation of the war poets from the cultural and political life of the home country. Though the guns of Flanders could ...”

“... was a new dichotomy, between the ‘tradesmen’ in Gissing’s novel and ‘artists’ like Henry James and some of the characters in the series of short stories he wrote to define the author’s place in a society that was cultivating the habit of regarding literature as a fine art: the writer as artist and respected public figure, not a lowly ...”

“... reading is interesting, though heavily indebted to Grant Richards. Housman read Proust and James; he enjoyed Colette; he much admired the work of Edith Wharton. Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he ...”

“... poem’s account of drunken officers shooting at steerage passengers was already in circulation: Lawrence Beesley, a second-class survivor, was denying it in his book within weeks of the sinking. Enzensberger’s steerage immigrants (‘Wogs, Jews, camel drivers and Polacks’) are the direct kin of those we see in Ragtime sailing into New York harbour ...”