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“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... of a displaced society in which few of the traditional myths – Red Clydeside on one hand and John Buchanite Tory collectivism on the other – have still got any clout. Piecing together a history in which one has been involved, one tends to isolate symbols or epiphanies which offer metaphors of change: Yeats’s ‘monstrous familiar images’. Another ...”

“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... praising it to the skies (and then grounding a few objections), I need to declare an interest. John Lennard says in his acknowledgments that he is in debt to me. Nothing like as much as I (and many others to come) now stand in debt to him, but his IOU had better be spelt out. First, that in some measure he took off from a 1978 essay of mine on Geoffrey ...”

“... allegiance of the individual talent to the collective identity of the team. In this light John Major’s cricketpersonhood is no accident, since the person who put the ‘gray’ back in Great Britain knows very well that cricket washes whiter. Nash avoids such immediately topical reference in favour of an old and ...”

“... a pantheon. So the nation took its atavism elsewhere: to places like Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray was buried in the churchyard he’d made legendary, and especially to Stratford, sanctified by the grave of Shakespeare. This argument about nationalism isn’t watertight, since it was London that spoke for the nation, and London never got Shakespeare ...”

“... Jeffrey Gray’s scientific biography of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is a worthy member of the distinguished Modern Masters series, which includes excellent semi-technical short books on, among others, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Russell, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. The author, who lectures in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oxford, writes from first-hand expert knowledge of experimental work in animal behaviour and the relevance of experiments on animals to human neurology and psychology ...”

“... The date was 24 March 1847; the place was the home of a friend on Hill Street in Hannibal, where John Clemens had taken to his bed with a cold that developed into pneumonia. It was in that room, only minutes before his father’s final rattling breaths, that young Sam for the first time watched one member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put ...”

“... the over-exposure of his wares in Hollywood’s window. Zane Grey was born in 1872 as ‘Pearl Gray’ – a name which he later changed for the same reasons that Marion Morrison became ‘Duke’ John Wayne and Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas. There was another motive. Grey’s birthplace was Zanesville in Ohio – a ...”

“... assistant. A typical letter from Malone asks where he might find a particular prologue by Sir John Denham, wonders whether Warton has come across any mention of ‘Marocco’ (a famous acrobatic horse exhibited around Europe in the 1590s), enquires about any use of ‘the pun on Ajax and A-jakes previous to Sir ...”

“... martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other works are mere rhetoric … His one great hatred was of dullness, which is very dangerous and can raise a whole nation in its defence.’ Ford Madox Ford, in an article written in 1939, agreed about Wilde’s essential harmlessness, but viewed his ...”

“... calling for reform and to that end appointed the ultra-respectable public school headmaster Sir John Wolfenden to chair it. When Wolfenden recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults over the age of 21 should no longer be considered a crime the Report was shelved by the Home Office. In the late Fifties, however, the Homosexual Law Reform ...”

“... She didn’t like her own name much either. Some years earlier she had written stories as ‘Edith Gray’; most often, though, in literature and in life, she was called H.D. The story of the love affair has been told before, and was set in its wider English and American contexts especially thoroughly by Helen Carr in The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra ...”

“... Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall ...”

“... other people’s intellectual deficiencies, or the loss of background information, are rebuked by John Hamilton: ‘Preposterous as it may sound, this book earnestly considers the possibility of Pindar’s obscurity’ – that is to say, deliberate obscurity. However, though Hamilton is not afraid to engage with Pindar, he is more concerned with more recent ...”