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“... scholars some distance from the day to day concerns of those who actually toil in the literary field. And ‘genre’ – a staple of literary analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in exploding or eluding it. Magazines, then, make for a nice object of study: still recognisable to both ...”

“... Murdoch is at her most endearing, earnestly practising ‘Greensleeves’ on the recorder in a field full of cows, discussing the international situation while wondering with rather more urgency whether the scenery will turn up in time. The journal evokes a Betjemanesque interwar world of japes and ginger biscuits, ‘strenuous breakfasts’ and ...”

“... by a more pliable editor. His successor at the Sunday Times had been the excessively fastidious Frank Giles, though he didn’t last long either. Murdoch was quick to tell him that he must leave his desk, and that from now on he would be ‘editor emeritus’, adding that ‘“e” means you’re out, and “meritus” means you deserve it.’ Sometimes ...”

“... Nixon would soon appoint to the Supreme Court) urged the defenders of capitalism to retake the field from their critics by establishing think tanks, media outlets and university professorships – all of which could help move ‘responsible opinion’ to the right, and did. At the same time, Nader started to over-reach. His Congress Project, an attempt to ...”

“... to listen to anyone. The Senate would pass his treaty or it would pass no treaty at all. Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut declared: ‘The president has strangled his own child.’ The flood of idealism that Wilson had unleashed dried up overnight. The enormous hope of yoking the exceptional destiny of the United States to the cause of world peace and ...”

“... preparations, especially the organising and funding of transport fleets, and action once in the field, are critically reviewed, notably in the case of Louis IX’s crusades, when ‘meticulous preparation’ slipped all too easily into the counting of chickens before they were hatched; and the intricate politics of the East are dissected with relish in a ...”

“... fathers and sons, sisters and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff ...”

“... appear until 1838. When it came to scholarly editions, the Americans were again the first in the field: in 1896 a Boston publisher (Ginn) brought out the first annotated Sartor, edited by the Canadian German scholar and essayist Archibald MacMechan, who provided much-needed assistance with the densely allusive text. Even as Norwood was charting the decline ...”

“... his fellow countrymen’s propensity to declare, in the words of the Paul Anka song popularised by Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Thomas, however, construed these lines personally, as a challenge not only to his dithering, but also to his involuntary sense of poethood, in which choice, he insisted, played no part. ‘It is all very well,’ he wrote ...”

“... in the neck. Imagine what it’s like for the writer. Or for Marlon.William Mann does not have the field to himself. There are at least a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of ...”

“... few trips to New York, including momentous visits to the Museum of Modern Art, where he catches a Frank Stella retrospective, and the Guggenheim Museum, where he sees a Moholy-Nagy exhibition. On his return to France, Bois gives up his own artmaking, and after a tedious course in Pau he decides against art history too. The siren call now comes from critical ...”

“... of Surrealism for feminist art and theory, which took up the question of ‘sexuality in the field of vision’ in the 1980s (as Jacqueline Rose referred to it then). In any case, today the women of Surrealism are esteemed as much as the men, if not more. Meret Oppenheim received a major retrospective last year, and women Surrealists featured prominently ...”

“... In June​ 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops. Like other senior military figures, he had criticised the luxurious lifestyle of German officers in Paris: their Etappengeist, the ‘spirit of the rear lines’, was in contrast to the Kampfgeist, or ‘fighting spirit’, of those dying at the front ...”

“... out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 ...”

“... The two correspondents should have interests in common and should be able to be brutally frank.’ One of his earliest modifications to his epistolary contract with Hale was to suggest that ‘now that there is more communication between us, I feel that I must be frank.’ Spontaneity was a contact sport, and ...”