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“... biographer came from the lips of Mary Archer herself, when she observed some years ago to Russell Miller of the Sunday Times Magazine that her husband had ‘a gift for inaccurate précis’. Laurence Marks elaborated on this aside in one of his excellent unsigned profiles for the Observer in 1984: All good raconteurs ornament the truth. Archer’s technique ...”

“... version of MacDiarmid’s pastures to work at the London Review of Books, the editor, Karl Miller, had a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and beginnings. Many powerful writers, in ...”

“... The adepts of Deconstruction in highest standing with the profession – Derrida, de Man, Hillis Miller – bring in gloomy reports on their reading, and the gloom is self-perpetuating, I agree, but I can’t see that a close reading of their books would find evidence of the glib levitation that Smith represents. There is, too, an ideological ...”

“... to mistake but even to betray its nature. Criticism, in any case, is no longer what it was; and Christopher Norris’s compact book on deconstruction is more useful, in its open-minded descriptive acuity, than other, more complex and defensive, treatments. Occasionally Norris falls into distancing gestures about ‘going too far’ or ‘rhapsodic ...”

“... has finally collapsed. Secondly, the war democratised Ford, and thereby democratised Tietjens. Christopher Tietjens, as a result of his love for Valentine Wannop and his experience of trench warfare, is prised out of his class prejudices. Such a humanist and sentimental theme would not have been admissible in a ‘French-style’ novel, and we are to see ...”

“... Yet, though the lines of battle have been starkly drawn, the engagements are seldom direct. Christopher Norris describes the situation perceptively in The Contest of Faculties, paying special attention to one of the parties on the literary side of the dispute: ‘Deconstructionists,’ he writes, ‘continue to snipe from the sidelines at a mainstream ...”

“... was correcting their existing taste rather than banning a writer they had not yet encountered. Christopher Hilliard’s English as a Vocation shows that applicants to Downing were expected already to have read large swathes of Shakespeare, 17th-century poetry, Romantic poetry and 19th-century fiction. Hilliard has dug up not only the entrance exams that ...”

“... than the evening air/Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars’), I was reminded of Christopher Ricks saying twenty years ago, in an article about the sexual revolution of the Sixties, that he was against the whole thing on the grounds that the new free-for-all was unfair to plain women. (What about plain men? Are women pleased to get any old ...”

“... starkly with the swaggering self-confidence and certainty of well-known freethinkers such as Christopher Marlowe. These men were not only willing to defend and disseminate their dissident views publicly, but deliberately set out to provoke their hearers. Their offensive pronouncements about religion as a Machiavellian instrument of awe and an insidious ...”

“... delivering him back at his flat I found that, even before I got home, I had started to cry. Karl Miller writes: A few weeks ago I visited Frank in Cambridge. I had known him for 52 years, and for much of that time I had been his editor, publishing him first in 1958, when he was a lecturer at Reading University. In a style of the period, I was warned against ...”

“... party without quickly being disgusted by its humbug or convulsed by its absurdity. Jonathan Miller was surely wrong when he said to Thompson: ‘The idea that Peter had an anarchic, subversive view of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything Establishment.’ My own experience ...”

“... cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him that all the ...”

“... culture he eviscerated in his fiction, and his letters become a catalogue of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a mental ...”

“... eel’ (‘Clive was very quick off the mark,’ Heaney drily recalled in an interview with Karl Miller). There is an interesting account of the reception of North in R.F. Foster’s new study, a compact but comprehensive guide to Heaney. Foster is well attuned to the shifting contexts, as one would expect of a leading historian of modern Ireland, but he is ...”

“... phrasing we adopt,’ as Harding said, ‘is part of the attitude we find we have taken up.’ Christopher Ricks’s common style is a case in this point. He doesn’t, I imagine, decide what he wants to say, and look for the words to convey his meaning. He chooses what he will say from the possibilities offered him by phonetic coincidence: he puns to ...”