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“... to have the cool exactitude of his father’s studies of the private lives of sea anemones. Peter Abbs’s introduction to the current Penguin edition, first published in 1983, accepts the memoir as a faithful record of what happened: ‘As a documentary record we know, from other sources, that most of the facts are accurate.’ This is very much the ...”

“... Pound was to renounce renunciation. The paths taken by Lambert Strether, Merton Densher and Emilia Gould, for example, would not be taken by the paganised protagonists of Modernist fiction. As a label, the concept seems indispensable. It has served to characterise and to legitimate a generation of extremely gifted writers. Recognising its usefulness, some ...”

“... surveyed the reading of wounded Tommies and discovered that their favourite authors were Nat Gould, Charles Garvice and E. Phillips Oppenheim. She defended their lowbrow preferences stoutly: ‘Our wounded warriors have surely earned the right to amuse themselves with the books that please them most, and to be free from the kind of officious pedantry ...”

“... of Thame. This Folio Society reissue comes in the expected fine binding and with illustrations by Peter Bailey, but without any notes to identify all the one-time celebrities, half-celebrities or ‘significant people’, as Fothergill rates them, who throng the road to Thame. Many famous names are dropped, sometimes no more than dropped. Literature and art ...”

“... with the intensity and the range of Mozart,’ says Charles Rosen in The Classical Style. Glenn Gould thought Mozart’s music was ‘hedonist’. The immediacy of Mozart’s music can be spooky. That simple four-note figure repeated twice, the viola motif in the slow movement of the G minor String Quintet, reaches out at us from the music, like Keats’s ...”

“... him a man with no credentials in science. Wolcot, the lampoonist, who wrote under the name of Peter Pindar, was probably not alone in finding Banks a study in vanity: an intellectual flea Hopping on Science’s broad, bony back. Although Banks did much to promote the international image of the Royal Society during his 42-year tenure as its President, he ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... The structure of argument is the same in Franco Moretti’s splendid Signs taken for wonders (with Gould rather than Dawkins in the background), which proposes a theory of literary evolution where genres play the role of species, and individual works furnish the random mutations. Human history, however, exhibits no such Darwinian dualism. For in the process of ...”

“... to a public meeting in New York where the news of the discoveries was announced. His partner, Doug Gould, had died in November 1992, aged 33. France was still only 35: ‘I’d lived my entire adult life in the eye of unrelenting death.’ He stumbled out of the meeting, was kissed during the celebrations by a stranger. ‘It was not over. It would never be ...”