“... end up producing a remarkable self-portrait. Though he had intended to preface the letters with a short history of their family, recollection soon faltered. Little more than a year separated the two oldest James children, but as far as Henry could remember, William had been ‘always round the corner and out of sight’ – so in ‘advance’ of his younger ...”

“... of Spartan diplomacy plenty of ammunition for his own campaign against garrulity. When King Philip II of Macedon sought to intimidate the Spartan leadership by declaring that ‘If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out,’ their reply was a simple ‘If’. The laconic riposte is a pivot or judo throw that makes use of an opponent’s superior weight ...”

“... and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery ...”

“... class at the New School. The only question was ‘what to write about’. During the 1950s, as Philip Roth would later explain, there was a widespread belief that the ‘devils’ had been defeated ‘once and for all’ and there was nothing more to say about the Holocaust: it was time to ‘start over again, en masse, everyone in it together’. Even The ...”

“... another advantage that might benefit the family. More than a century later, in 1754, 13-year-old Philip Quaque, a Fante of royal birth, was sent to London for the same reasons: he became the first African to be ordained a priest in the Church of England. John Naimbanna, the son of a Temne ruler in what is now Sierra Leone, arrived in Britain in 1791. He ...”

“... Braudel composing the first draft of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and a photograph of Vernant, a commander in the French Resistance, in military fatigues at the 1944 liberation of Toulouse.Murray offers up his own biography against the foil of his heroes. He traces the roots of his ...”

“... lesson came from the work of other living poets who used form. Tim introduced me to the poetry of Philip Larkin, whom again, ignorant economist that I was, I only knew as the compiler of The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. But as I read Larkin (whose poem beginning, ‘The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being said,’ has a ...”

“... proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ‘dark-haired children at play’, the      moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark ... of the war’s early days. No one thought it would be a ...”

“... once met an Englishman. He was in a good grey flannel suit, the flannel also covering his face. Short of indicating a prudent change of tailor, the incident (if dreams have incidents) serves to point up the temptation to English Kafka and joke him down to size. The Channel is a slipper bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order ...”

“... seven more children on her, Elfriede Jelinek, Austria’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, posted a short essay on her website under the title ‘Im Verlassenen’. It begins: ‘Austria is a small world in which the big world holds its rehearsal. The performance takes place in the very much smaller cellar dungeon in Amstetten – daily, nightly. No performance ...”

“... in a brilliant new book on this Emersonian vision and the economic order it celebrates,† Philip Fisher argues that democratic social space in America depends on and fosters what he calls ‘a culture of abstraction’, atomistic, unbounded and transparent. The United States lacks virtually all of those elements that, to European thinkers of the 18th ...”

“... text and intertext. But Riffaterre’s commitment to the structuralist project stops well short of dissolving the poem into a play of circumambient codes and conventions beyond all reach of formal analysis. His readings are squarely opposed to the current mood of ‘textualist’ euphoria which merges poem and commentary in an endless exchange of ...”

“... the precepts of the virtuous life, good governance and the paths to spiritual transcendence. In short, the preoccupations we associate with Karl Jaspers’s Axial Age, roughly 750-400 BCE, the time of Confucius, the Upanishads, the Buddha and Socrates. But in Ge’s understanding of Chinese history, the Axial Age was not a time of radical transition from ...”

“... Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and ...”

“... noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952, her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the Town’, the section of the magazine over which Shawn kept the tightest of reins. Brennan’s male colleagues, including ...”