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“... himself an example of Jewish Gnosticism. The original scheme is still in place, and as I was reading this new book, with its cabbalistic title, I was noting that it was but a spume that played upon the ghostly paradigm of The Anxiety of Influence when I turned the page and read: ‘Yeats wrote that “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Against a ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”

“... phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading Rose, on the one hand, and, on the other, one of the chapters of the Wagner Handbook or Wagner in Performance, you would not realise that they are talking about the same thing, so different in tone and intent is Rose from the other two. Take as an ...”

“... journalist mentions that he’s ‘taken to smoking weed’ while setting down the words we’re reading – ‘can you tell?’ In another, a small-time columnist with ‘a computer infested with miscarried books’ makes the mistake of looking her work over while stoned: ‘I was too high to follow from the beginning of a sentence to the end, but the ...”

“... getting up even earlier, five or six o’clock, for ‘quiet times’ – private prayer and the reading of the Bible. I’d resolved to read the Bible through every year and at the beginning of training I think I was up to about the Book of Daniel, so I would creep downstairs in the early morning and sit outside, shivering in my Freewheelin’ Bob ...”

“... often willing to experiment with highly volatile social materials.’ So the bishops became, in Peter Brown’s striking phrase, impresarios of the sacred. They took the bodies of the saints from their shrines outside the cities, and placed them under the altars of their cathedrals. Rather than a trigger for conflicting pieties, the saint became a centre of ...”

“... over – than a loss to knowledge. Auden was a library in himself and now all this store – the reading, the categories, the associations – had gone down with that great listing clay-coloured hulk. And though much of what he knew he had written down and published, either as lectures or in reviews, there was always more, the flurry of memoirs and ...”

“... both with these carefully considered haircuts makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton ...”

“... in political matters too when she wrote to a fan, Eddie Cohen, who had sought her out after reading a story she published in Seventeen the summer before she went to Smith. ‘I consider my story not far from the usual Seventeen drivel,’ she wrote. ‘Why is it that my particular brand of drivel rates such subtle flattery?’ Replying to his reply, she ...”

“... mouth was impossible to grasp because I didn’t understand the basis.Can​ I read this before reading the other five books in the series?A. Yes, because this one begins with the publication of the series and people’s reactions to it, and so it takes place on a higher, more self-conscious level, so to speak. It also recapitulates some of the material in ...”

“... in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy.I’ve pieced this together from my reading, and googling, and I may well have things wrong. Ernaux hasn’t written about her life in a neat this-then-that sort of way. Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over ...”

“... scholarly biography of the poet and her family in 1974; and Ralph Franklin’s variorum and reading editions of the poems in 1998 and 1999. The problems posed by the translation into print of manuscript poems never prepared for publication have been the subject of much recent discussion by scholars to whose work Gordon understands her own to be ...”

“... lose themselves, tourists – cocooned in Holiday Inns never really leave home. Travel outstrips reading, the guidebook, common language; tourism moves in an envelope of familiarity, experiencing the already advertised. Lindop can register the appeal of the former, notably in his ‘Traveller at Yazd’: The signs ahead are scarlet Arabic: a manic exuberant ...”

“... order his dishevelled social and sexual lives for good. The year before they married, the diaries peter out. Stanley Weintraub, who has edited all 12 diaries and the fragments from 1880 and 1917 into two stout volumes, gives the game away in his lively account of their provenance. When Shaw married Charlotte, he left his papers at his mother’s house in ...”

“... that cultural tourists should flock to Britain to see at first hand what they had for so long been reading about. The French made a nuisance of themselves by following Walter Scott in the street, demanding to be allowed to draw him. But they were disappointed by British art, and of the modern buildings Defauconpret could only mutter: ‘des briques, des ...”