“... through the book. Pre-eminently it is the monstrous, amiable, ruthless and disconcertingly candid Lawrence Schiller who stands in or weighs in for Mailer in the second half of the book – Schiller, ‘something of a carrion bird’ (before Gilmore, he had been the mass-mediator for Jack Ruby on his deathbed, and for Susan Atkins in the Manson ...”

“... That kind of brain-generated seeing, which has no starting point in seen objects, is one source of James Turrell’s art. Another is the experience of space without reference points, as in a white-out when snow and mist remove all indication of near and far, or its converse – the absolute darkness of a blacked-out room. Indeed Turrell seems to find sources ...”

“... Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan seek to map a new course for the post-socialist Left, and to turn attention away from that beguiling but now exploded theme, egalitarianism. The long fixation with egalitarianism has, they complain, allowed the Right today to ‘appropriate the word liberty and equate it with the acquisition of power’; and the phenomenon of Thatcherism would certainly bear them out ...”

“... On the morning of 16 June, in city after city throughout the world, small groups of people will gather to engage in curious rituals. In New York, some fifty people will each pay $25 to breakfast on mutton kidneys and slightly burnt toast. Optional courses will include ‘nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs’ and ‘fried hen-cod’s roe ...”

“... outing to the races at Longchamps; ‘black-eyed Susan’, the New Mexican cow beloved by D.H. Lawrence: these are the things that stay in the mind when diagnoses and depreciations are forgotten. Jeffrey Meyers, who has done solid biographies of Lawrence and Hemingway and has now done one for Conrad, is particularly good ...”

“... because it confounds moral life with doctrine or dogma. We need only the reminder of Henry James, who, while cautioning against any ‘moral restrictions set upon the field of consciousness’, affirmed the moral character of art: ‘to count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as it would be (if the ...”

“... the people. It’s in the poems. The October day I stopped for lunch I found her reading some of Lawrence’s letters, which she compares with Keats’s. Miss Niedecker lives in terms of the communications from Zukofsky and a few others. Besides her writing and her extensive reading, she works at the local hospital for support. She is a frail person, like ...”

“... begetter of admiration in other people. Yet none that loved him could easily match the love of James Boswell, who puttered along for many years, joyously, drunkenly, boisterously, earnestly, with his love of Dr Johnson both a wondrous act of worship and a curious kind of self-loving. Arm in arm on their way up the High Street, Boswell and Johnson were a ...”

“... the TLS’s existence, The Wings of the Dove was reviewed by Constance Fletcher, who wondered how James’s novel would do ‘for short railway journeys and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s ...”

“... on Eliot’s poetry given at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1968 and another on Eliot and Lawrence from the early 1970s. Admittedly he was by then in his seventies and these performances can hardly represent him at his most potent. Any listener now will be struck by the peculiar voice: reedy, nasal, lisping. He reads in an incantatory monotone. In ...”

“... to outdo all autodidacts. His next, barely more palatable option was to join his elder brother James in his Boston printing works. Josiah had whipped Benjamin regularly, and now James beat him too, for smuggling saucy comment pieces into the New-England Courant under the alias of a worthy widow called Silence Dogood ...”

“... in Oliver Twist was ‘the TRUTH!’ Even Tolstoy needed at times to make the same point. Henry James or George Eliot, on the other hand, never give the impression that the question could arise: the distinction was not part of their artistic outlook or method. But as a touchstone it is still very much around, and can take unexpected forms. Importunity about ...”

“... James Atlas’s The Great Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America’s poète maudit who died tragically unfulfilled in 1966, having lived out the truth of one of his best essays: ‘The Isolation of the Modern Poet’. The Great Pretender tells the story of a tyro versifier, who comes to artistic consciousness around 1966 in Chicago and who hilariously fails to attain any subsequent artistic fulfilment ...”

“... English taught him to paint in watercolour. He admired and was influenced by English painters – Lawrence, Wilkie, Bonington and Constable – and took subjects from Scott, Byron and Shakespeare. While others crossed the Alps to see Rome, Delacroix crossed the Channel to England, and rather liked it (although he did think he might have liked Italy ...”

“... Eliot came in for a politely lethal rebuke after being pissy about Forster’s description of D.H. Lawrence as ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’. (‘Mr Eliot … asks me exactly what I mean by “greatest”, “imaginative” and “novelist” and I cannot say. Worse still, I cannot say what “exactly” means – only that there ...”