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“... What, Phelps asks, is the general impression produced on the mind of a foreigner by reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and others? ‘It is one of intense gloom.’ These old-school interpreters of the Russian spirit would not have felt at home in the intellectual world Elif Batuman comes from. A Stanford comp. lit. PhD, raised in New Jersey ...”

“... biographers with ‘a particular investment in Schumann’s madness’ who ‘inevitably ended up reading Schumann’s life backwards’, and cites his ‘lifelong inclination to silence’, as well as his fondness for generic composition (piano music, songs, symphonic works, chamber music, oratorio, in successive periods). But the suggestion that his use of ...”

“... Despite all this, the novel reads as if it were, indeed, a long letter composed in a single day. Peter Bush’s new translation of the novel is its fourth. The first two came in the late 19th century, from a pair of indefatigable translators, Ellen Marriage and Wormeley. Both of their versions now feel rather wooden; both gently bowdlerise a bit; and both ...”

“... in the Sixties and Seventies, she thinks that rhyming English would have been pointless, and Peter Dale’s rather desperate versions (Penguin, 1978) surely prove the point. To the povre Villon, importuned, resurrected, sanctified in heretical pantheons, Sargent-Bauer is a dependable ally. No dutiful translation like hers can hope to ride with the ...”

“... of the University of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the castle, he ...”

“... else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an extended survey of the genre’s ‘golden age’. I’ve read a huge number of these novels over the years, so when I was asked to write about Ngaio Marsh I blithely ...”

“... nearly over the hill. His account of Molly Bloom gives her several more lovers than the book by my reading, indicates, unless he means her admirers. Sometimes his commentary sounds like the report of a Marriage Guidance Counsellor – ‘He and Molly must face their problems of sexual adjustment as solitary individuals cut off, to a great extent, from the ...”

“... novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible. As in a proto-Pop Idol, lines of would-be Scarletts queued up for desultory screen-tests, each dreaming of Tara and stardom. Letters poured into the Selznick studio recommending ...”

“... argued for taking shelter at the British Legation. According to the Daily Worker correspondent Peter Fryer, who left the Communist Party after his dispatches from Hungary were spiked or slashed to ribbons, Davidson was dismissive of the planned move to safety. He ‘lay in bed reading Tacitus’ and refused to go along ...”

“... dearly have liked to have been told what young Alex read and if, for example, such typical boys’ reading as Jules Verne and the short stories of H.G. Wells stoked his enthusiasm for a career in science, and I should also like to know how he came to write so well in the straightforward narrative style of Daniel Defoe. But on all these matters we are left to ...”

“... from the unfinished chapter – for confirmation of the sickening news of her lover’s suicide. Reading the ballads is a way to mark time by theatricalising her own anticipated pain, to draw it out and make it bearable. Yearning for ‘the loves that complete and control’, the devotee of ‘Our Lady of Pain’ implores Dolores to bite so hard that she ...”

“... the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in ...”

“... two different sides of his double identity. The only contemporary support Paulson adduces for this reading of Hogarth comes from those to whom the subtext of his popular prints was addressed – the London apprentices and the London poor. Such people may have seen Hogarth’s engravings in the windows of print-shops or on the walls of taverns, and though no ...”

“... of Turgenev, who much admired her, seems never really to have caught on with the Russian reading public.Although there are one or two hard-drinking ladies in Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow Stations, it presents a man’s world, a world of booze. Completed in 1970 during the Brezhnev era, the ‘time of stagnation’, it was not published until the ...”

“... her). Crawfie was cast out of the femly. Her book does reveal a shocking amount about the girls’ reading habits: ‘There was in the bookshelves a complete set of Beatrix Potter’s books. One in Welsh!’ J.M. Barrie, something of an expert on children who never grow up, came to read to them at Glamis. Crawfie was the first of the Windsor grasses – in her ...”