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“... they still represented 12 per cent of all American movies. But if the year that brought Richard Nixon’s triumphant re-election was the last in which the number of Western releases would reach double figures, the residual significance of the West as the bedrock of American identity was eloquently reiterated, just before the collapse of Soviet ...”

“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to use the ...”

“... that his verses were not much good. Latin verse composition was a mental reflex for most educated English men, and for a significant number of women too, in the period from 1500 to 1800. In the later part of that period it was exercise for the mind, a test of its vigour, and an index of civility. In the early 16th century, though, Neo-Latin verse was much ...”

“... In these columns six years ago, among a chorus of praise for the new, revised Oxford English Dictionary, OED2, Charlotte Brewer entered a dissenting opinion (3 August 1989): The riches stored in the two previous dictionaries are now much more accessible, and reviewers have already reported how delightful it is to browse through one of the 20 handsome volumes of OED2, and ponder, marvel or cavil at individual words and definitions among the extraordinary wealth of examples recorded on its pages ...”

“... The​ posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped ...”

“... recognise here the subject-matter of the Great Dane joke – the emigré dachshund, spurned by the English dogs in the park, who insists that back in Berlin he had been a Great Dane. There were those, even less fortunate, who did not make it at all: arriving penniless and with little knowledge of English, they ended up on ...”

“... a tale of flight, family separation and reunion scattered across the waters and cities of what Richard Halpern called ‘the decaying Hellenistic world’. At its core is the romance arc of a prince, Pericles (whose motto, In hac spe vivo, means ‘In this hope I live’), losing and then finding his wife and daughter: a wife seemingly buried at sea, but ...”

“... of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had pretty much seen everything. He had visited sacred centres from Benares to Salt Lake City, with a pilgrimage to Mecca in between; he had trekked thousands of miles into central ...”

“... has been as timber, raw material for crafts, and fuel. The idea that there is something specially English about our hedgerows turns out to be another myth, nor is it true that these all date from only two centuries ago. The latter is a particularly pernicious notion, for it has lulled civil servants into condoning the philistinism of contemporary farmers, the ...”

“... but on Joyce’s work as a whole, he is vigorously interesting and helpful. The body-language of Richard Brown’s book is far more specific than Parrinder’s, but his assumptions are much the same. He has two aims in mind. ‘One tries to place Joyce’s work in the context of ideas in which he participated.’ The ideas in view are mainly connected with ...”

“... of heat, sound and fury. This style of writing was the sole (and rather measly) contribution to English letters made by Kingsley Martin, and has been imitated by successive New Statesman columnists – Richard Crossman, Paul Johnson, Gerald Kaufman, Matthew Coady et al. (One only has to listen to the Parliamentary ...”

“... Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a life. There was another private story in those earlier years – of a failed marriage and an unhappy wife, of childlessness and ...”

“... is concerned to argue something more specific. He claims that the British, and more precisely the English, brought a peculiar commitment to the doctrine of progress and thereby played a unique part in installing it as the pre-eminent value of the West. Whether this is entirely fair to the French is a very moot point. Whether, in any event, it is cause for ...”

“... been a welcome respite from the familiar realities of wind and rain. In the earliest literature in English it is usually cold, as most people presumably were; but here too, detailed descriptions are rare. The ice and the storms are either given as facts, or personified. Gods and frost giants control temperature and wind speed. Even Chaucer, Harris laments, has ...”

“... characters sit together comfortably in Peele. Here, and not only with respect to this play, The English Romance in Time raises more questions than it can possibly answer. That is understandable. Cooper attempts to distinguish fairy tale from romance on the grounds that the former is driven by ‘magic’ whereas the latter subordinates it, giving its ...”