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“... a matter of renewed literary and philosophical concern. I have in mind the recent work of Hillis Miller (The Ethics of Reading), Tobin Sieber (The Ethics of Criticism), Alisdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) and Barbara Hernnstein Smith (Contingencies of Value). What Booth has rediscovered is that ethical criticism is in a sense a redundancy, since all ...”

“... Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in the love-act and simultaneous orgasm, are passed down from master or mistress to hand-picked pupil in certain rare and long-delayed bouts of sexual ...”

“... and communal showers. ‘In stark contrast to the push-button extravagance below,’ Russell Miller noted in Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy, ‘the furnishing of the dormitories abruptly takes on the aspect of a rather parsimonious girls’ boarding school.’ They kept him busy: Hefner claims to have trumped Casanova, logging more than two thousand ...”

“... as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I contributed the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the Establishment which Gordon Brown, as a student at Edinburgh, had ...”

“... Britain, no doubt because they happened to be around the house at the time. The young Thomas read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason at the age of 13 and became a lifelong freethinker: in 1925, he was to compose a foreword to the collected works of Paine. He started to lose his hearing at an early age and always said later that it helped him concentrate. He was ...”

“... Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found designing mews houses and studios in Camden, Hampstead and Islington, all of course included here. All were a cut above the usual intellectual level of 1980s architects; Colquhoun, who died last ...”

“... death blow but wonders rather whether ‘the feminisation of America’ is one reason we now have Tom Cruise in place of Bogart. A variety of voices are cited. Sharon Waxman in the New York Times attributes the loss of ‘man’s men’ to what she believes (against a good deal of evidence) to be the entirely peaceful and cosseted existence everyone in the US ...”

“... status with charm and good humour’. Henderson introduced Hamilton to Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, the power couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large Glass. At this ...”

“... for the double humiliation inflicted on the government by the Supreme Court at the hands of Gina Miller, apart from apparently serious suggestions that the Supreme Court should be given a less grand name or moved back to the Palace of Westminster where the law lords used to sit, presumably to remind them who’s really in charge.As​ a judge, Laws handed ...”

“... Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents with his ...”

“... of a class-bound nostalgia for social hierarchy, aligns himself with a tradition that goes back to Tom Paine, Milton and the Diggers. This move has structural similarities to the Norman Yoke theory of the 17th century, which claimed that the popular liberties of the Saxons had been (temporarily, for several centuries) suppressed by the alien laws of a ...”

“... to these standing stones and circular cairns that punctuate the fields. In the manner of Hugh Miller, stonemason and essayist, the grain of Ascherson’s thinking is apt to spark off these heathen formations, these ‘ritual spires of condensed fear and memory’, as he calls them, and a melancholic attitude accompanies the notion that the modern age can ...”

“... cassette player’. Typographical tricks suit satirists such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who seem to be graffiti-spraying billboards with impudent brio, deploying jazzy effects (italics, caps, boldface, exclamation marks, dashes) to fill a wide canvas. They’re performance artists in print. Pynchon, too. Moody is more of a heartbreak ...”

“... Norman Mailer. Is Mailer not, in Vidal’s throwaway line, one of the three Ms, along with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, ‘conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’? (His initial defence, if that is what it was, was to compile the table ‘Number of times married, Number of ...”

“... We see this familiar pattern in the early life of Ephraim Sieff, the son of a Lithuanian village miller, who landed in Hull, thinking he was in America. He took up peddling, but when insulted by a woman at the very first house where he tried to sell his imitation jewellery, he moved out to Manchester, and met a Landsman who got him a job with a tailor. Sieff ...”