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“... by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair: the Old Man, the Deep Male – Iron John. Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, ‘dominated’ the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year, and has made, as we shall see, a heavy ...”

“... John Cheever’s two celebrated novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, are now reissued in one volume. In this form, we can see that the two are really one and the end was always implied in the beginning. We are often told that the American novel is not very deeply rooted in the social world, that in a society so fluid and so quickly changing fiction hardly has time to take stock of the way things actually work and tends to blow up into some kind of surreal fantasy ...”

“... the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui ...”

“... in 1937, or thereabouts, has now set into a kind of quaintness: My nine-tiered tigress in the cage of sex I feed with meat that you tear from my side Crowning your nine months with the paradox: The love that kisses with a homicide In robes of red generation resurrects. That, from Eros in Dogma (1944), is a fair sample of its manner, which seems to be ...”

“... of Michael LongleyThe Antrim Glens: you,Edna, Seamus and OvidTeaching us summer.Sumin memory of John BurnsideOne offered us his yellow teapot, then later fell into a Japanese volcano.One always had a twinkle in his cigarette.One motorbiked in leathers on poebiz through central Paris.One carried a dog in a cage.One wrote ...”

“... Britain’s prisons. It is instructive to compare some of these pages with Gerry Adams’s Cage Eleven, his account of Long Kesh. With the exception of one or two chapters – a hard-nosed, political attack on force-feeding, some pop history about 1690 – his brief cameos are little more than a pathetically unsuccessful attempt to add something to the ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously – in noticeable contrast to ...”

“... activists, Marxist professors and anti-psychiatrists – turned out en masse for the symposium; John Cage and William Burroughs came along; and Foucault flew in from Paris. It quickly became a circus.Deleuze and Guattari had long envied American writers like Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, with their ‘gift for ...”

“... defeat,’ Sarah, Louise’s more academic sister, says in Drabble’s first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963). ‘I felt all women were doomed. Louise thought she wasn’t but she was. It would get her in the end, some version of it.’ Is the young woman having a moment of reflective irony because she has escaped a woman’s lot – of dusting and getting ...”

“... won over another. Her novel writing career began brilliantly and precociously with A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), published when she was 24. Since then, the preoccupations of her novels have generally kept pace with what one assumes to have been her personal progress from Cambridge graduate, through marriages, pregnancies, growing children, marital ...”

“... gesture for ‘play’. Even this man, however, does his playing with Nim from outside the cage. The initial adoption of Nim was playful, some would say frivolous – ‘it was the 1970s’ is the refrain figures in the film keep using. The adoption in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an act of casual compassion that turns into something else. James ...”

“... the ‘hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs’, whose roars were ‘like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo’, but for James they represented ‘the forces of civilisation’. This was one way of describing them. Another would have been to identify them as personal friends of the playwright. Full marks to James, though, for looking ...”

“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”

“... library of Alexandria or the arrival of the man from Porlock. In an essay on At Swim-Two-Birds, John Cronin quotes a crucial passage in Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ in an effort to find a context for the offences the book commits against both art and, indeed, fiction. James wrote: Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves ...”

“... For instance: ‘17.11.1972. Travelling in a taxi past London Zoo. Over the wall is a big cage, in the centre of which is a tree without leaves. Two men in boiler suits are crawling towards each other on their stomachs along the branches on either side of the tree.’ I did see, round here recently, a blind man who is also a midget and pulls a little ...”