“... the settings changed accordingly, to the fictitious commuter burgs of Bullet Park and Shady Hill.) Like Fitzgerald, Cheever was, in his early novels (The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal) and in stories like ‘The Enormous Radio’ and ‘The Pot of Gold’, concerned with the fragility of material success and of social status – which is to ...”

“... The 1630s saw the ‘great migration’ led by the Rome-hating John Winthrop, whose ‘city on the hill’ sermon has echoed through many inaugural presidential speeches. The God who blessed change in England and English colonisation in America was indisputably a Protestant God. By this prescription, strands of myth, memory and history were twisted together ...”

“... with Herne the Hunter, who is mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor and reimagined in Susan Cooper’s children’s fiction), and even Epona the horse goddess, often thought to lie behind the horse-dominated stories of Rhiannon in the Welsh Mabinogion. Britain is notably lacking in evidence for the cult of Epona that was widespread ...”

“... the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up the hill. According to Max Brod, his lifelong friend and first editor and biographer, Kafka loved the movies; at times, Brod reported, he would talk about little else. For the most part, however, Kafka abstained from written commentary on the cinema. To be ...”

“... drafts, second thoughts, cancelled readings and emendations), accompanied by a fanfare of notes; Susan Shatto’s edition of ‘Maud’, devoting yet more minute attention to this single work (it is unhappily labelled ‘a definitive edition’ – what on earth is the indefinite article doing there?); and the highly-praised Lang-Shannon edition of ...”

“... established the Clinic for the Treatment and Study of Nervous and Difficult Children in Notting Hill. The child didn’t replace the neurotic; the neurotic re-emerged within the child.Klein’s model of the mind disorganised the difference between childhood and adulthood. Her eventual understanding of the mental positions between which we continually ...”

“... a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing nickname ‘Captain Fiction’. The ...”

“... same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story of these antiquarians and what they learned from the ruins that obsessed them. Their sensibility, as she shows, was itself ancient. In the age of Augustus, as Rome became a marble city, poets looked back with ...”

“... a volley probably directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri Ford. Twenty years before Susan Sontag insisted that the camp sensibility had ‘hardly broken into print’, Duncan was arguing in print that the time for camp was over. In the name of gay rights, and in line with his universalist instincts, Duncan suggested that the appropriate attitude ...”

“... campaign posted a fifty-second ad in which, helped by a cartoon of two boys climbing a hill, she explains the difference between equality (‘equal opportunity’ backed by non-discrimination laws) and ‘equity’ (the equal finish that is assured by a truly equal start). The Biden-Harris combination must have been meant to assure voters of ...”

“... ought to join them, or rather change them and use them in surprising ways, like the poets Geoffrey Hill and Bob Dylan, who is admired for altering ‘Take it to heart’ to ‘Take it to your heart.’ No cliché is irredeemable; we should seize on them, give them, so to speak, a new loss of life, and so contribute to the renovation of the language. Another ...”

“... of translations of Giono into English recently; along with the ones under review here, we have had Hill (NYRB, 2016), Melville (NYRB, 2017) and Occupation Journal (Archipelago, 2020). I’m not sure what this means, but I hope it suggests a new attention to a once famous writer, and all of the books are well worth a first read or a return. The Open Road and ...”

“... a gap between an experience and its representation is only superficially similar to that of Fanny Hill, when she comments on the monotony of erotic narrative as compared with erotic experience: her point is that the language and even the actions of love-making have a sameness which cannot do justice to the sensations of pleasure. Her priorities are in other ...”

“... up the other émigré East Coast families, round up his own family, and then dominate them all. Susan Wilkins, one of the voices in the book: ‘My God, the father was something! A cross between Mr America and General Patton.’ Fuzzy would stride around, in a white bikini, and pronounce, in the sunshine. No one was allowed around who wasn’t ...”

“... from the bonds of marriage, he took up not only with Assia Wevill but also with a woman called Susan Alliston, who is mentioned in ‘18 Rugby Street’, in Birthday Letters, as ‘holding me from my telephone/Those nights you would most need me’. Alliston, who also wrote and published her own poetry, and was interested, like Hughes, in anthropology, was ...”