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“... In the poem which provides John Wain with the title of this book Yeats is addressing the dead Gore-Booth sisters and telling them, quite tenderly at first, that now they’re dead they know it all – all the folly of a fight For a common wrong or right – so that it seems dying has enabled them to catch up with him, for he knew it and stayed alive ...”

“... merely to be pure in heart. Before long, Isherwood too was waving this phrase about as a panacea. John Layard was revered as the one man who was pure in heart, who was therefore without guilt or fear, and consequently unable to contract disease, and who was profoundly, fundamentally happy. When Auden told Isherwood that in Berlin were to be found not only ...”

“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”

“... I got​ to know Karl Miller in the 1960s, when I was in my mid-twenties and he was in his early thirties. He was the literary editor of the New Statesman and I was a junior editor – ‘a young editor here’, my boss used to say – at Faber and Faber. I didn’t know him well – a friend of mine, Francis Hope, was his assistant – but I talked to him at parties and once or twice I had lunch with him (I remember being told to eat my meat ...”

“... Iain MacIver shows his complicated personal involvement in the great storm in the Scottish Church, John Pinkerton discusses his place as a lawyer, and Karl Miller the evidence his preferences give for the changing literary taste of the day. Before the proliferation of central government departments and local administrative ...”

“... thinking of taking acting lessons. Perhaps he had been inspired by the careers of Jimmy Boyle, John McVicar, ‘Dirty Den’ of EastEnders, and Paul Barber, one of the ‘Brothers McGregor’ who also spent some time inside, and who recently claimed in the Sun: ‘Jailed turned me into a star.’ Burglary, theft, blackmail, arson, extortion, violence ...”

“... has appeared for many years – perhaps not since Joseph Gregor and the historian René Fülöp-Miller produced their Das Russische Theater in Vienna in 1928. The subject is still astonishingly rich, and if it has lost something of its original shock effect for our theatres, it gains greatly by the author’s presentation of many of its less well-known ...”

“... Women have always written about men,’ Jane Miller remarks in Women Writing about Men (1986),but they have needed to be extremely circumspect about doing so. To read as a woman is to confront that circumspection as a mode of being and a kind of language … Of course, I too want to hear what women writers have been telling us about women ...”

“... Of those that remain, Joshua Reynolds, the Shakespearian scholar Malone and the politician John Courtenay are affectionate and supportive. These were the years, as we occasionally have to remind ourselves, when his Life of Johnson was completed, put to press, published, relished and extolled. This does less for him than might have been ...”

“... mass of De Quincey’s extant writings, one thing has a bearing on another was that of J. Hillis Miller, in his book, The Disappearance of God, which was published in 1963, before Miller took his deconstructionist turn. The critical avant-garde was at that moment phenomenological, in the manner of Gaston Poulet; the ...”

“... they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it hasn’t happened can know how peculiarly disagreeable it is to be lampooned in print. But as Goethe said, and I quoted to the famous Jonathan on another occasion: ‘If you don’t want to be ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”

“... When her mother, Mary Kate, drew the talent of her daughter to the attention of Katherine Miller, a white woman for whom she cleaned house, Simone found her first patron. Miller paid for the piano lessons which the Waymon family couldn’t afford and steered the child at the age of five to Muriel Mazzanovich ...”

“... to get away from her mother – they share a room – and spies an escape route in Master John Edes, a mild-mannered shipping clerk who has been teaching her to read the gospel. But Edes is an associate of a sinister newcomer called Matthew Hopkins, who is on a mission to root out witchcraft. In wartime Manningtree, Puritan fervour is running ...”

“... of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall there, but it was mostly done in Connecticut; or that Kerouac might have written On the Road there, but that was mostly done on West 20th. Wolfe’s two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home ...”