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“... weight on the invariable quality of Defoe’s writing. The authors make a number of claims for his powers: they admire his ‘improvisatory’ sentences, by which they mean something like the attribute Boulez discovers in Debussy – that is, ending up a phrase, a sentence or a paragraph in an unforeseen way, as opposed to the ‘forward planning’ of ...”

“... compass and tight formal constraints’ of the sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound and page-limited – Simon Rae’s introduction to News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems compares editing an anthology to doing a crossword puzzle – the Norton’s two volumes manage to give readers ‘infinite riches ...”

“... remarkable man. His people were from Derbyshire, which his poet son certainly didn’t advertise. Thomas Lowe Bunting took a Gold Medal for his MD thesis. He was later elected to the Royal Society in Edinburgh for his work on the histology of the lymphatic glands of all sorts of creatures. Bunting recalled his father’s ‘tiny surgery with a desk about two ...”

“... examples and connections, from Shakespeare and Sterne to Kafka, Borges and Muriel Spark. The powers of artifice, of code and convention, exert a claim which should at least give us pause in the drive toward ‘deep’ interpretations of motive and meaning. ‘Sterne goes shallower than that,’ as Josipovici artfully puts it. His case is argued most ...”

“... the gallows seems to have declined in the present volume, perhaps another index of flagging powers, and the febrile priapism that used to accompany the deaths of others seems also to have receded. But the affair with M.C., which had been triggered by the forensic frisson of a criminal trial, ended in a deliciously morbid amalgam of guilty nightmare (for ...”

“... this was 1968, and Forty Years On was one of the plays on his desk when the Lord Chamberlain’s powers expired and stage censorship was abolished. There were other jokes, equally bad but more ‘satirical’. At one point Field Marshal Earl Haig strode on, in bright red gloves: ‘As you all know, I have just this minute returned from the First World ...”

“... replay of the old tradition which counts the killing of the victim as one of satire’s archetypal powers.) Many details of Hardy’s account are placed in a densely informative context of recorded folk practices: ‘the din of cleavers, tongs, tambourines, kits, crouds, humstrums, serpents, ram’s-horns’, the parading of effigies of the victims, the ...”

“... revelation, and a virtual doctor of the Church, expounding theology with supreme authority – ‘Thomas Aquinas in drag’, as one critic called her. All the while she remains the same Florentine lady he cherished on Earth.Throughout his life, Dante engaged in an audacious project of self-exegesis and self-correction. The Vita Nuova anthologises his earlier ...”

“... wrote in one of his essays for Bute. In particular, he had a clear understanding of the balance of powers, ‘where one part of the legislative body checks the other by the privilege of rejecting, both checked by the executive, as that is again by the legislative; all parts moving, and however they may follow the particular interests of their body, yet all ...”

“... books); the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed ...”

“... letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts of their times, not to their resolutions. But they do not endorse the ...”

“... Conventional criticism allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and ...”

“... never rose above the level of the hunting party or war band. More recently, scholars such as Thomas Kavanagh and Hämäläinen have found considerable evidence of a sophisticated if highly decentralised politics. Unlike the rigid hierarchies familiar to Europeans, Comanche political organisations were fluid and consensual, alliances of local groups based ...”

“... and opportunities for friendship with educated men and women, and had won the respect of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. For six years – his longest stay in one place – he had occupied a respectable flat on the edge of Regent’s Park. As if compelled for a second time to kick away his chances of success and suitable companionship, Gissing ...”

“... that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ In Murdoch and Nagel I think we find the genuine spiritual impulse or ...”