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“... goings-on’ (a chapter from A Glass of Blessings was included in the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories). Her gay men ironise femininity, break the rules of decorum and make light of deep feeling. Mervyn Cantrell, the caustic and gossipy librarian who lives at home with his mother, shamelessly lusts after Ianthe Broome’s Pembroke table in An ...”

“... the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled the past queen, who had done so little for his hero, in order to highlight the shortcomings of the present king, was not the recipient of royal favour. But William Camden was; his famous Annales were written with royal ...”

“... and make your Holocaust victim an unusual souvenir of a memorable Sunday afternoon? Or maybe, as Philip Gourevitch observed, just throw it away as you leave the show? After all, the museum Holocaust experience always comes to an end, and your victim can easily be dumped with the trash when you’re safely back in the sunshine – a neat replay of ...”

“... in English have either stopped half-way (like Francis Steegmuller) or been too brief (like Philip Spencer); the most recommendable version of Flaubert’s life in recent years has been disguised as the two-volume Steegmuller edition of the Letters. Now comes Herbert Lottman, the diligent biographer of Camus. Pre-eminently a dredger and sifter, an ...”

“... writing, the thing that can be learnt on the campus, ‘the consequences’, as Philip Larkin put it, ‘of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic, and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable)’. Gay Clifford was an academic, and by all accounts a brilliant and effective one, a lecturer in English at ...”

“... on the cover), nor even a biographical essay (as the author claims in the introduction), but a short, balanced and intelligent account of Franco’s long reign. The author seems to have encountered the traditional difficulty of finding anything original to say about the dictator’s domestic life and relies heavily on the published memoirs of Franco’s ...”

“... Lawrence, is ‘about envisaging a possible socialist future for England’. It plots protagonist Philip Kane’s brush with Woman (in the guise of Anne, a smoking, free-loving acolyte of the feminist, socialist and gay sociologist, Edward Carpenter) and with Soviet Communism (in the guise of the Russian exile, Ivan Smirnoff, a barfly and violinist, whose ...”

“... and he had made it so.’ His elegance is much admired. In the Twenties he has ‘his hair short, slicked down and impeccably parted, tie nonchalantly neat, white handkerchief fashionably ruffled’. In 1940 he impresses the Ministry of Information with his perfect dark-blue suit. On a visit to New York in 1945 he loses a trunk containing six of his ...”

“... literary scene were anti-Stalinist socialists who defended Trotsky. In 1937 William Philips and Philip Rahv had revived Partisan Review as a left-wing anti-Stalinist literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight ...”

“... of violent death, whatever the numbers involved, we do tend to demand explanations. Garrigan is short of them. That this should be so, testifies to Foden’s seriousness of purpose. It does mean, however, that at crucial points his novel has a flatness that leaves the reader stranded. Nicholas is a young doctor sent to Uganda to work for the Ministry of ...”

“... Scots when his mother abdicated a month after his first birthday in 1567, and dying several months short of his 59th birthday, he reigned effectively for 57 years. The regal union was unusual in that it was not the direct product of a marriage between heirs, but involved the succession of a King then aged 37 to a virgin Queen who had reigned for almost half a ...”

“... Union, his fourth adult novel, he plays with two genres: the counterfactual, derived from Philip K. Dick; and the noir thriller, derived from Chandler and Hammett. The counterfactual is all in the background. The thriller is all in the foreground. The thematic link between the two is the endlessly precarious nature of Jewishness. Two years ...”

“... the late ‘my mother-in-law’ British comedian Les Dawson). Somehow, I am always drawn to these short, pyknic or mesomorphic creators, whether they are Brodsky, Benn, Beckmann or my father. As the Nazis came up things grew abruptly tight for Beckmann. He lost his job in Frankfurt (‘public funds for Jew lackeys like Beckmann’), was pilloried in the press ...”

“... and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she took her MFA. She has published two books of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), and two novels, The Vagrants (2009), which seems to me one of the first masterpieces of our stumbling century, and Kinder than Solitude (2014), and now a book of ...”

“... and end up asking: ‘really, must I think about all of this/a second time in this short life? … must I grieve it all again?’ Her jump cuts and exclamations say how absurd, how impossible, an ordinary adult life can seem; such a life must be lived within incompatible timescales, at once attending to the present moment, and planning for the ...”