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“... just about to emigrate, gave her a Bible, and ‘all the revelations I had either guessed or read about elsewhere fell into place.’ At the same time, he lent her books of which she had never heard. I was buried under an avalanche ... Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’, Tsvetayeva’s poems, and a blue-bound volume of Mandelstam, published in a tiny print-run ...”

“... semiotics and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon ...”

“... place in Marin County, California – ‘the golden land’ – in 1975, and many of those whom Richard Levine talked to claimed to have seen it coming, since it was well-known that Mrs Olive and her adopted daughter hated each other. Being a minor at the time, Marlene served only three years in a Youth Authority institution, and, now at liberty, has ...”

“... of glibness. His characters can be miniaturised by the economy with which he defines them. Some of Richard Stern’s stories are likewise impaired by fastidiousness. Trimmed, sandpapered, polished, they communicate first and foremost, paradoxically, the unobtrusiveness of the author’s skill. But there is an agreeable magnanimity and humour here. Stern ...”

“... I recently attended a lavish production of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome at the Staatsoper in Vienna. Directed by Boleslav Barlog, sung by the diva Mara Zampieri, and staged, in keeping with Beardsley’s erotic drawings, by Jürgen Rose, it was a feast for eye and ear. And yet as I crossed the road to the Cafè Sacher afterwards I wondered how successful the performance had really been ...”

“... anti-vaxxer, QAnon, birtherism, Biden’s election ‘steal’.In the early 1960s, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified a ‘paranoid style’ in American political culture. The Whigs of the mid-19th century had emerged, at least in part, out of the Anti-Masonic Party, and the Republican Party that succeeded the Whigs in the 1850s was not only hostile ...”

“... who joined 38 Black activists in a voting rights campaign. The Baptist church where they met to read scripture and sing spirituals was invaded by law enforcement officers, resulting in arrests, imprisonment and, ultimately, the burning down of the building. For her father, Allen writes, ‘suffering violence linked him to a sense of moral ...”

“... walls. The balance of forces is just as likely to shift in the other direction. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers looked to contemporary sculpture for the ethos of structural transparency they applied to the exterior of the Pompidou Centre. Some artists in the 1970s, such as Michael Asher or Iain and Ingrid Baxter, had already begun stripping back the spaces ...”

“... to Mamet, are the so-called professionals, the producers and writers and directors who haven’t read their Eisenstein and think movies are about character, and following actors around with a camera, and who can’t read movie scripts unless they are puffed out like bad novels, full of what Mamet calls ...”

“... nor colloquial usage. The absurd sentence follows two lines later. ‘Twice have drowned,’ we read (the first person being understood), ‘thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ Eh? ‘Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ I see. Or rather, I don’t. In common with most likely buyers of this book, I cannot ...”

“... is a vivid account of ‘the wagging of tongues’ as the washing went on. Thus, of Clémence, we read: ‘The cheeky beggar had her say, some dirty word or other, over each article; she laid bare all the misfortunes and all the misconducts of the customers, joking over all the holes and all the stains that passed through her hands ... so that, at every ...”

“... much like a blurb for her book. To be postcritical, she tells us, is to ask new questions when we read and to answer them in a new vocabulary. The impulse to do so comes from dissatisfaction with two dominant readerly positions: ‘the furrowed brow of the scholar deciphering an intractable subtext and the blissful mien of the subway rider devouring a ...”

“... pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of a single candle in the provost’s lodgings at King’s College, Cambridge, or in his last years, as provost of Eton. It may seem heartless or unsporting to deconstruct these little tales, for the author made no very exalted claim for ...”

“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... is the biographer to make of this? ‘In December of 1819 he began to keep a list of books he had read.’ Very convenient for Richardson, but a mixed blessing for his readers, since great blocks of his book consist of these reading lists. ‘He was reading ... he loyally read ... he was reading in all directions ... he ...”