“... that has taken its poorer cousin in out of charity ... As for literature after reunification, George Steiner thought there could be none anyway after Hitler; but he had in mind the bureaucratic degeneration of the language. The question reactivates the matter of tradition, and of the framework in which the new text – any new text – is to be received ...”

“... Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson of the Dial; to Margaret Anderson of the Little Review. Two hefty books collected his courtship letters to Dorothy Shakespear, and those written to her some thirty years later from the Disciplinary Training Centre outside Pisa, where he was incarcerated ...”

“... and had Mozart not lived there would have been no Figaro. But it’s hard to accept that if Watson and Crick – clever and ambitious though they were – had not found the double helical structure of DNA, no one else would have done so.Artists create; scientists discover. That’s our usual understanding of the thing, and scientists – together with ...”