“... volume of poetry, War’s Embers, appeared in 1919.Gurney’s previous biographer, the composer Michael Hurd, believed his subject’s truest vocation was music and that the songs are a greater achievement than the poetry. Trevor Hold, also a composer, disagreed, arguing that Gurney’s poetry is ‘more original than [the] music’. I am on Hold’s ...”

“... was based on an underestimation of his seriousness: according to the present-day Guardian critic Michael Billington, Coward’s exploration of ‘the thin dividing line between sex and savagery’ in Private Lives puts him on a par with Strindberg. A rather different reassessment is provided by Dan Rebellato, whose revisionist deconstruction of the Osborne ...”

“... musicians. There were talented singers in his social circle, notably the opera singer Johann Michael Vogl, but Schubert would often sing and play his songs himself. He had a nice voice and was a good pianist, but one wonders what these renditions must have sounded like. The technical demands of the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise were ...”

“... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”

“... offers a sort of dialectical critique (the suggestion has been made before – see, for example, Michael Ewans’s Wagner and Aeschylus: The ‘Ring’ and the ‘Oresteia’, 1982). One might take each cycle as a reverse image of the other; the structural symmetries are striking. The Oresteia begins with the murder of a hero, Agamemnon, and ends with a ...”

“... Lacan) providing a link between psychic economy and the workings of materialised textual desire. Bliss was it in that dawn to be reading Tel Quel and watching the signs that led up to les événements of May ’68. Sollers was among the chief theorists of that ‘moment’, along with Barthes and Derrida. It is not hard to see the connection between these ...”

“... may also reflect Wilson’s discovery of marijuana and LSD. The predominant tone is a mixture of bliss and anxiety – there is elation and exaltation, but you also can’t help noticing how many negatives or qualifiers swirl around in this lover’s discourse: ‘wouldn’t’ … ‘that’s not’ … ‘don’t’ … ‘I just ...”

“... off for the Blackwall Tunnel, the tour of inspection was cancelled. Deferred satisfaction. Future bliss. That’s what this gig is all about. It’s a Calvinist package. Suffer now, the worse the better, and paradise will follow. We are being asked to endure the noise, dust, pollution of a 24-hour building-site as the justification for the heavenly pleasure ...”

“... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...”

“... supported Hersh, for a time, even while they did not always share his political views. It was ‘bliss’ to have the legitimacy and the millions of readers that the Times provided him, Hersh writes, but he remained frustrated by the paper’s ambivalence towards established power. By the summer of 1972, Hersh had uncovered three controversial projects ...”

“... indeed a parson – curate of Okewood in Surrey – and if, for Wordsworth, it was just then ‘bliss to be alive’ and ‘very heaven’ to be young, you couldn’t tell that from Malthus’s surviving early sermons: recycled, inoffensive homilies in which the revolutionary events in France were scarcely even noises off. (The mild young Malthus could have ...”

“... The counterweight to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, with her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care ...”

“... condemns it to a restless state of mistrust. Beguiled by a mirage of perfect epistemological bliss, it denies the knowledge it has, deserts it and sets off optimistically on what will prove to be a ‘journey of despair’. The itinerary can be read off from the chapter titles of the Phenomenology. Consciousness begins by putting its faith in the ...”

“... does not visit it, but hears the groans of torment from afar), and the Elysian Fields, the zone of bliss, where Aeneas meets his father, Anchises. Spirits do not stay in the Elysian Fields for ever – there is an elaborate cycle of reincarnation at work – but the Aeneid draws a clear connection, as the Odyssey does not, between one’s actions in life and ...”