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“... group in a medium shot. By the time the bride has been called ‘voluptuous’, we are somehow close enough to see her eyelashes. On Fisher’s reading, the shift occurs because Whitman, as narrator, in stealth has supplanted the bridegroom and is inviting the reader to join him. But this need not follow if one supposes that the eye of the mind has a more ...”

“... the decade after she had achieved publication, problems remained. In a letter written to her close friend Bob Smith (who published the first appreciative essay on her novels) Barbara Pym lightly passes on the information from Cape that ‘8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and “declined” ... Excellent Women and they are still plodding on ...”

“... before Dürer died, Lorck drew a severe portrait of his great predecessor. He emulated Dürer’s close scrutiny of his subjects, but he also had a quirky, even comic imagination and a taste for odd juxtapositions and discrepancies of scale. In a superb sketch in chalk on blue paper, held in the prints and drawings collection of the British Museum, a large ...”

“... in his presence as a ‘black bastard’. Harmondsworth is a ‘fast track’ centre, conveniently close to Heathrow: 99.6 per cent of the asylum claims considered there are rejected. The young man I spoke to believes – and he may well be right – that the high turnover ensures a profit for the private company that runs Harmondsworth. The company, United ...”

“... sexual fantasies about his sister cover many pages of the novel. His chosen way of feeling close to her is to imagine and simulate her sexual pleasure, to let himself be penetrated by a succession of rent boys and casual male lovers. When young men are not around, he can impale himself on a smooth tree branch or – in one revolting scene – a sausage ...”

“... of the windows were dark and a notion of privacy seemed embedded in the stone. It must have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New ...”

“... pleasure, or perhaps to discover whether he would enjoy it, he bent over and brought his vile face close to the face of the judge’s wife and kissed her mouth.Ana returned to life, overcome by nausea … For she thought that she had felt on her lips the cold and slimy belly of a toad.The end!What do these four examples have in common? In all of them, the gay ...”

“... Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by French-based artists.Francis Bacon, whose work Berger reviewed in the New Statesman ...”

“... not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul ...”

“... of his four years at the Treasury. Only Terry Coleman, in his extended Guardian interviews, gets close to his subjects. The responsible profile-writer has to exercise discretion. On the other hand, to take an obvious example, the personal insecurity of a senior politician, which may have wide public consequences, can only be appraised by reference to his ...”

“... the story at a safe distance even in full force, and we pull our punches when the story cuts too close to the bone of reality. But fairy tales are always about experiences that actually happen and vivid incestuous episodes are found in both realistic and fantastic variants of the Cinderella story all over the world, not just in modern Europe. Often, highly ...”

“... had already succeeded in expanding her M.O.W. into M.O.W.O. Having married her maternal cousin, Frank Oliphant, before she ever laid claim to her work, the novelist managed to efface her maiden name and to emerge in print with her mother’s. Since that mother had a fierce conviction of the aristocratic superiority of her family to her husband’s, doubling ...”

“... are marred, made brutal by the imprint of vice, but Suguro unmistakably. By this time, even close friends and admiring disciples feel occasional doubts. Suguro, after all, is a rather special Japanese case, a man who has built a career on his commitment to Christian morality, a teacher who has attracted a reverent following. As one of his closest ...”

“... a friend, ‘I admit to a taste for certain affectations and ornamental commissions.’ He was as frank as he could be about his artful concealments. His extensive correspondence with his family (just over 650 pages of letters to his mother, father and maternal grandmother), taken together with Mariani’s gruelling account of the parents’ marriage, makes ...”

“... and the political and cultural tensions which form the novel’s wider context are devastatingly close to our own. But Gee brings out the strangeness within the familiarity. Up to this point, my only acquaintance with New Zealand fiction had been through the delicate and evocative short stories of Frank Sargeson, recently ...”