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“... for the novel. The genre thrives on irony and play, as Milan Kundera repeatedly remarks, and T.S. Eliot meant to praise Henry James by suggesting he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. We might say the same of dozens of other novelists. Plenty of ideas, but none of them nailed down, all of them implicated in other, conflicting ideas; and there are ...”

“... be,’ Thomas Hardy wrote, ‘it exacts a full look at the worst,’ and there’s an echo of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in what happens to Phemy: the President of the Immortals has his sport with her. At times Coppard’s worst is even bleaker than Hardy’s. Hence the complaint of one reviewer when ‘The Hurly Burly’ appeared in Coppard’s second ...”

“... to the streets of London, this time walking with their flares in front of motor cars. As T.S. Eliot evoked ‘the brown fog of a winter dawn’ in The Waste Land, a Committee for the Investigation of Atmospheric Pollution insisted that two-thirds of the problem came from domestic fireplaces.New instruments recorded 340,000 pieces of soot in every cubic ...”

“... antithetical terms. ‘The Dialect of the Tribe’ (a phrase of Mallarmé’s appropriated by T.S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’) takes the form of an academic article in which an unnamed professor discusses a small New Guinea tribe whose peculiar language has no content, but instead somehow enacts the process of translation. Every Pagolak sentence embodies ...”

“... are what Google sells to advertisers.’ Vaidhyanathan, who likes alliteration but isn’t so big on facts, doesn’t explain what he means by ‘sells’ (or whether ‘to sell a fancy’ could mean anything at all), but if he’s implying that Google makes the information it has about us available to advertisers then he’s wrong. It isn’t ...”

“... his own devising. He distinguished himself among the crowd at Nin’s apartment by volunteering to test the anatomical plausibility of the dirty stories they were assembling for an anonymous benefactor. He was an insatiable seducer, and a bold one too: one night after dinner with Kael and her boyfriend, Duncan cornered the boyfriend and flashed his erection ...”

“... read’. It took the genre into what the paranoid CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, citing T.S. Eliot, called ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, and topped bestseller lists in Britain and America. Cornwell described his sudden success as ‘like being in a car crash’. He resigned from MI6 in 1964. Once again, the exact sequence of events is unclear, but he ...”

“... of starting with the personal, topical and perhaps autobiographical, then working towards a T.S. Eliot-like ‘impersonality’ through repeated rewriting and editing. Coetzee was drawn to ‘impersonality’, Attwell remarks, ‘because it suited his personality’ – a curious formulation. But ‘impersonality is not what it seems. It is not a simple ...”

“... by asking her if she’d read it. Sontag had, many times, and the reward for passing this test of a pick-up line was an introduction to San Francisco’s gay scene. Nightwood showed Sontag ‘the way I want to write – rich and rhythmic – heavy, sonorous prose’, but also how to live, as she and her new friends laughed about ‘what a parody of ...”

“... as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes ...”

“... the Olivier stage seemed an ideal space for verse drama: not the sort associated with T.S. Eliot, ‘so discreet and well bred in its metrical gentility you wondered why it bothered to go public at all,’ but something more akin to music hall or panto, with ‘a vernacular energy to crackle across the footlights and engage an audience’. Ibsen ...”

“... it in his counterweight, Adorno for Revolutionaries (2011), Adorno as ‘a kind of German T.S. Eliot without the practical cats’.Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ But he was no misanthrope. A melancholic, certainly, but also a ...”

“... cook, parlourmaid and governess, but Isabel made sure her boys were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky ...”

“... have as much to do with Somerset Maugham (whom they must have helped to invent) as with T.S. Eliot. But there is a curious quality in these early stories which throws some light on the writer’s originality during the 1890s. I want to illustrate this quality, somewhat Irishly, from another and litter collection, because one story there reveals it ...”

“... the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the idea, implicit in Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’, that to embrace Donne you had to give up Milton. It was a stage in which, not for the last time, Kermode offered himself as a reconciler and peacemaker. Romantic Image, moreover, in the way it pursued a certain ...”