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“... disliked him at this particular moment. Grim, laconic and humorous, it is a bracing sentence, a short, sharp shock. A modern couple, unmarried and unattached, is in ancient Venice. They meet a couple, married and detached, by whom they are fascinated. The fascination turns out to be the lethal hypnosis which the snake bends upon the rabbit. Best not to ...”

“... the papers she had hoped he would destroy. During her life she had published only three volumes of short stories: In a German Pension (1911), Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party (1922). But posthumously, under Murry’s supervision, she grew miraculously prolific. He brought out two more volumes, The Dove’s Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924), which ...”

“... Nineties. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what they don’t know is the deep, secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason ...”

“... literature have been Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, prophets of Cold War paranoia, rather than Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, or all the chroniclers of the immigrant experience from Henry Roth to Jhumpa Lahiri. Pynchon and DeLillo have had oddly few successors, even though the end of the Cold War, with the apparent triumph of American-style ...”

“... history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class ...”

“... especially those of the last decade, have been a salutary reminder that Western ascendancy was short as well as nasty and brutish. In particular, the West, with its own established religion in decay, has grossly underestimated Islam. From the death of Muhammad to the decline of the Ottomans, the most formidable military and economic power in the world was ...”

“... view of human development. The lizards who developed parthenogenesis at once collected an enormous short-term advantage: by avoiding all the dangers and uncertainties of sexual reproduction, they solved the problem of keeping the species going. But in the long term, the solution must lead to extinction. The gene pool is not mixed, healthy mutation and ...”

“... sin. This is emphatically what doesn’t interest Amis or Adair. The movie controversy, in short, highlights the fact that the real source of Nabokov’s staying power lies elsewhere, in the words on the page. Readers and re-writers read Lolita for its expertise in unrealities – its literariness, its exploration of the questionable and disintegrating ...”

“... of propped up, terminally ill consumptive girls (they couldn’t lie down because it made them short of breath). The Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo has some fine examples. Unlike The Scream, they are not surrounded by crowds of tourists, even if one of the best of them, The Sick Child, is also by Munch. As an adolescent, he had witnessed the slow death from ...”

“... thing. When he started writing to Bann he was almost forty and an intermittently published short-story writer, playwright and poet. He had just published Rapel: Ten Fauve and Suprematist Poems (1963), his first foray into the new medium of concrete poetry, but most of his work as an artist lay ahead, as did the ‘avant-gardening’ of Little Sparta in ...”

“... he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of his ...”

“... as heinous as those committed in the name of a god or gods. Considering that secularism has such a short history – less than three centuries – the secular-minded have been catching up with religious violence rather assiduously. Sébastian-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, a writer who managed to preserve his sense of humour despite his close acquaintance with the ...”

“... data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory. Since his death his brain has been shaved into 2401 slices, each 70 ...”

“... Levi as recorder over that of storyteller is to distort his achievement. Levi wrote at least three short stories before the war (two, ‘Lead’ and ‘Mercury’, can be found in The Periodic Table; the third was published for the first time in Angier’s biography, The Double Bond, in 2002). Although he insisted that before the publication of what he called ...”

“... London at the time. The most famous was Toynbee Hall, whose secretary Attlee would be for a short period in 1909-10. The paternalistic idea behind the settlement movement was that the urban working class would benefit from having university graduates live among them: they would provide uplifting social, moral and aesthetic leadership of the sort ...”