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“... instances made ‘more than usually irritating by meagre content spread very thin’. The poet John Ciardi, who also taught him, was more perceptive, suggesting that when Gorey found his voice his writing would be ‘either transcendent or simply pointless, depending on whether you follow it into some idea of order, or merely into the bric-à-brac of ...”

“... less serious than Aids. (Oddly, the only PWA in the novel is an anaemic English poet, called Lord Aubrey Buffing. Wolfe dislikes Brits.) A District Attorney up for re-election and a Jewish Mayor who needs the black vote get on the Henry Lamb bandwagon. (To be fair, Wolfe seems to dislike New York Jews and blacks even more than the British.) Sherman is hunted ...”

“... the process. It also reflects the strikingly ‘novelistic’ character of many of their lives. John Barrell has observed acutely (in the LRB of 2 November 2000) that so-called literary biography seems now to have become markedly less ‘literary’, subordinating or virtually ignoring the work of the writer concerned, except insofar as it can be made to ...”

“... now doing less. In particular, the excellence of the BBC has broken down. The former BBC executive John Gau has alleged, in these columns, a monopolistic, dinosauric gigantism. And as Gau conveyed, this tendency is linked to a reluctance to risk the unpopular and the unusual (as distinct from the routinely scandalous and untoward) in giving opportunities to ...”

“... Muse’ whose death gave such pleasure to the poet Marvell (‘came to his death,’ says Aubrey, ‘after drinking with his chin tyed with his cap (being fatt) – suffocated’), showed relative restraint in plumping out the plot and modernising the tone; his Tragedy of Antigone (1631) makes its bow to Seneca with an expository prologue, and to ...”

“... destroyed by a woman with big feet. All this was interspersed with arresting illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert.The Yellow Book proved hospitable to the new kinds of female writing (and, to a lesser extent, illustrating) that flourished at the end of the 19th century. Much of its subject matter was directed at or concerned with ...”

“... of something fairly robust in the artist’s character. He was a foot-fetishist. The New York poet John Giorno, an old boyfriend of the bewigged one, gave an account several years ago of what his pal liked to do on his nights in. Just to get you in the mood, here’s his account of what he and Andy did on the day ...”

“... even though he was already engaged to the beautiful 18-year-old Elaine Orr, whom John Dos Passos described as a ‘poet’s dream’ and about whom Cummings would write hundreds of poems. Thayer was less annoyed, it seems, at losing Vivien than at Eliot’s sense of superiority. He compared Eliot the critic to a father punishing a naughty ...”

“... rights, who befriended mice as well as cats, but who cherished his old dog, the Reverend Doctor John Langborn; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her spaniel Flush, immortalised by pet-lover Virginia Woolf; and so on. The significant point is that, more often than not, pets help humans to acquire ‘sympathetic tendencies’, as Locke insisted, and here the ...”

“... just close enough for something of fashion and suggestions of sex. Richard Le Gallienne, one of Aubrey Beardsley’s friends, ‘raced about the parish at all hours on his bicycle with his halo of long, fair hair uncovered and his almost feminine slightness and grace set off by a white silk shirt, big artist’s bow and velvet knickerbockers’. Grant ...”

“... and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John Henry Newman or even joining a monastic brotherhood. The spiritual intensity of his Oxford phase and the dream of brotherhood never left him, but the appeal of the church gradually faded; by the time he set out for London three years later, the disciple of ...”

“... culture was in decay. As a writer, Powell clearly loves certain heroic spirits – Burton and Aubrey are most to his mind and taste – who confronted the gigantic and ruined flux of their culture, shaping it into some kind of disciplined pattern. Thus Powell himself divides his book into four firm sections: ‘The British’, which introduces us to an ...”

“... The dramatic west front, with its towering oriels, is an abstracted Tudor composition which, as John Summerson pointed out, may owe something to the central reference library in Bristol designed by a distinguished but less applauded English near contemporary, Charles Holden. But there was no precedent for the extraordinary library space behind those tall ...”

“... but died in 2004, aged 79, of Lou Gehrig’s disease. A few years ago, the Cambridge geneticist Aubrey de Grey announced that patriarchal longevity was already on the radar screen: ‘I think the first person to live to 1000 might be 60 already.’ We are well on our way, he says, to learning how to repair the molecular and cellular damage that causes decay ...”

“... the details. There was never any question of the three defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always ...”