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“... office or even one of the new universities. Here are the same harassed but well-meaning staff, short-handed, crippled by lack of funds, struggling to make the institution work despite all the curbs and cuts imposed by a penurious and ill-disposed government. After umpteen TV series the look of the place is quite familiar too, though not as lofty as the ...”

“... Dalí were all icons in this junior-varsity phase. But I remember being mesmerised, too, by a short documentary I saw in high school about art made by schizophrenics. (This would have been in the late 1960s, the heyday of R.D. Laing’s radical anti-psychiatry movement.) Most gripping were the magnificently demented illustrations of Louis Wain ...”

“... neither has achieved what might be anachronistically called its own symbolism. An anti-Modernist short story by Mary McCarthy tells of a creative-writing teacher in an American university who is informed happily by a pupil, as he finishes his fiction, ‘I’m just putting the symbols in’; there are moments in the two early tragedies (the arrows shot at ...”

“... and writes: ‘All my life/I felt my self’s lack of necessity.’ His best short story, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, is set in a movie theatre where the narrator watches on, helpless, as his father proposes to his mother on screen. ‘Don’t do it,’ the boy pleads. ‘It’s not too late to change your minds, both of ...”

“... satire and romantic tragedy. It was such violations of classical decorum that so affronted Philip Sidney and caused him to rail against his contemporaries’ taste for ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’. Shakespeare liked nothing better than to tease or confound his audience’s expectations: he renders the tragic effect of Othello even more cruel by means of ...”

“... of Hayward’s work took, or who wrote it, or how closely it followed its source, or how long or short it was; but we can say that a playwright would have found in the deposing and killing of Richard the obvious focus of the play. As John Manning, the modern editor of Hayward’s text, observes, its ‘dramatic and narrative trajectory was aimed to express ...”

“... Malone. He was initially a sceptic: he thought Theobald had tricked up an old play, perhaps by Philip Massinger, with Shakespearean touches. His own copy of Double Falsehood survives, tartly annotated, especially where he found genuine echoes of Shakespeare: he thought the line ‘Throw all my gay comparisons aside’ (clearly parallel to ‘lay his gay ...”

“... slightly pathetic foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style ...”

“... accounts of recordings made by Eliot, of stage and radio adaptations made by others – oh, in short, the lot! It is a phenomenal achievement; and although reading it cover to cover can feel like being stuck in some brilliantly devious Borges story, it surely sets standards that few succeeding editors of the complete works of poets of the last century are ...”

“... and did so with such ruthlessness that one friend suggested the book should be subtitled ‘A Short Cut to Unpopularity’. The prose of Eliot (with whom Graves was supposed to have collaborated on the study of modernist poetry he eventually wrote with Riding) is given a chilly slap: it ‘seems to shrink from the responsibility of “bestowing ...”

“... it off-putting.One of the extras asks me what I am reading. I show him my book, some Alice Munro short stories, whereupon he says, ‘I’m reading this,’ and takes out a paperback of My Secret Life, the saga of the sexual adventures of a middle-class gentleman in Victorian London. It’s a book with more sex per page than almost any other, and not a book ...”

“... Games. The Chinese woman walks, right shoulder to the fence, in a clockwise direction; her husband short-strides with less urgency the other way. And when they meet they do not acknowledge one another, not so much as a nod or a smile. My impression is that he is less enthusiastic about the regime. He wears a monkish hooded top and looks like a sixty-a-day man ...”

“... But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating ...”

“... need for a Big idea. On her first official visit to Harrow after their marriage, she delivered a short speech to Mosley’s constituents thanking them for their wedding present. ‘Saying just the right thing in the right way,’ the Constituency President wrote to her husband, ‘she gripped ... the heart of her audience at once.’ Mosley was interested in ...”

“... relationship.’ The whole experience brought home to Virginia a difficult truth. She wrote to Philip Morrell: One cant, even at my age, believe that other people want affection or admiration; yet one knows that there’s nothing in the whole world so important. Why is it? Why are we all so tongue tied and spell-bound? The greater openness with her ...”