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“... and so eager to believe that the Muse of History doesn’t have to pay any attention to it? The short answer has to do with tact and tactics. He is afraid that even true claims for art will become false when stated; their very utterance will do them in, shift them to the realm of pomp and abstraction. The longer answer is found in the thematic arc of The ...”

“... allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and figures’ of the ...”

“... to make the ambiguous miracle of the father twice. It is clear that if the face behind were also short on life and lacked blood and resembled a mask, then the power of the first image would be reduced; it would seem like a failure, its inwardness merely like an absence of outwardness, a brute refusal to comfort the viewer or endear itself to us. There is a ...”

“... they’ve seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see!’ Hitchcock was just short of his 63rd birthday when Truffaut interviewed him. He had remained staggeringly inventive throughout a long, prolific and highly profitable career, and there were seven films yet to come, including The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Two American ...”

“... no more bars … if you don’t stop now’ – and within a year had married the sociologist Philip Rieff. Now she wrote about Nightwood instead of imitating it: her adviser, Kenneth Burke, had once lived with Barnes in Greenwich Village, and what she ended up writing – she argued that the novel made beauty out of something dissolute, where T.S. Eliot ...”

“... that, in his own small way, he would have given it a hard time. I am not sure what his reaction to Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist would have been. He would doubtless have admired the dedication of Roth’s ‘pure’ Communist, O’Day, but it is to Ira Ringold that my father would have instinctively warmed – to what Roth describes as ‘the sanity of ...”

“... the UK to piggyback on the publication of this book),* Purple America and The Ice Storm, and his short-story collections, The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven and Demonology. He also co-edited Joyful Noise, a collection of essays devoted to the New Testament. In The Black Veil Moody assumes the role of apostle. This book is a secular gospel, a modern ...”

“... never heard of. It was all terribly shocking. Thom was a great reader of novels. He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I ...”

“... be mistaken, as A Lifetime on Clouds was described to me, for the work of an Australian Catholic Philip Roth.If that were the case, however fine Tamarisk Row and its successor are (and they are), it’s unlikely you’d be reading this essay. Murnane’s international reputation, which has grown to speculations of a Nobel, rests on his novels and stories of ...”

“... lasted for a century or so, until the western Roman Empire limped to its end in the course of one short generation. Both silver and small change ceased to be minted, but the solidus and especially its one-third fraction, the tremissis, formed a thread between classical antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages. The story is similar, if somewhat more complicated, in ...”

“... theories of The Da Vinci Code and the bestselling soi-disant historical studies that inspired them.Philip Almond surveys the torrent of claims and counterclaims in theological and popular literature across two millennia and sets out to show that Mary Magdalene has always represented ‘the sinner we should aspire not to be and the saint we should desire to ...”

“... marital devotion and hints of what was to come. Early in December 1884, he wrote a brief note to Philip Griffiths, a 20-year-old from a wealthy family in Birmingham: ‘My dear Philip, I have sent a photo of myself for you to the care of Mr MacKay which I hope you will like and in return for it you are to send me one of ...”

“... of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ...”

“... to produce a future citizen of Soviet America’.After twelve issues, two of the young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, appalled by the Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, wrested the magazine from party control. The new PR emerged in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George ...”

“... but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire a second monastic surname, often the place they had come from). The life of a monastery centres on worship, an intricate performance of chanted services rhythmically punctuating every day of ...”