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“... meaning of these figures. It is difficult for any friendly reader of these poems not to act like Harold Ross, sometime editor of the New Yorker, who would scribble ‘WHO HE?’ in the margins of any copy that struck him as insufficiently explaining its references. But to translate these poems into historical gossip is to miss the whole original meaning they ...”

“... panel”, (including Alistair Cooke, Jessica Mitford, Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux, Fay Weldon, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Dwight Bolinger, Elizabeth Traugott and many more). What is revealing is how the panel’s response to certain types of usage has changed between 1969, the date of the first survey, and ...”

“... human and not divine in origin. For Freud, as he works out his own mythology – and his work, as Harold Bloom intimates, should be read as being more akin to Blake’s Prophetic Books than to James’s Principles of Psychology – the question is: what are the higher authorities higher than in a secular society? Or rather, what is it that requires this ...”

“... the trouble he caused the reader, but without highfalutin’ claims having to be made. If, as Harold Bloom once suggested, Freud’s writing will outlive the profession of psychoanalysis, and if the idea that Freud is in fact a translated writer for the English-speaking world is taken seriously, then new versions seemed to me potentially of value. No ...”

“... of his relations to Locke and Hume rather than to Plato. The most formidable defence of Shelley is Harold Bloom’s Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959). Bloom dealt with the case by shifting its ground. We are to read Shelley as ‘an agnostic mythmaker’: ‘from his concrete I-Thou relationships, the poet can dare to make ...”

“... his maturity as a poet. The poetry enlarged its scope with the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold – which are about the intellectual and his political role, though to read Frederic Raphael you wouldn’t know it. Having shown Byron becoming a star, he doesn’t know what to do with him as a mere writer. The second half of the book, which takes Byron ...”

“... who thinks ‘Goethe … settled for being a genius’ and could have gone further, has, like Bloom (Harold, not Allan), an eidetic memory. And if Goldstein is caught up in the erotics of mental power, so the female protagonist in The Mind-Body Problem thinks (as her best friend observes) that ‘the male sexual organ ...”

“... and a craftsman’s intimate satisfactions.’ If he is a minor novelist with a major style, as Harold Bloom has it, then what is style? We speak of it as superficial, as a gloss applied to plain surfaces, but a sheen can become inherent, architectural, like the sheen on pigeon feathers. He hit blue heights in those early years and his design is what ...”

“... be describing the work of Donald Davidson in philosophy of language, and of Nietzsche, Freud and Harold Bloom in moral psychology, as so many manifestations of a willingness to drop the idea of ‘intrinsic nature’, a willingness to face up to the contingency of the language we use. I shall try to show how a recognition of that contingency leads to a ...”

“... Ode as perhaps the poet’s most perfect work. Among more recent critics, Bernard Blackstone and Harold Bloom have stressed its absolute superiority to the other Odes. Certainly ‘To Autumn’ is flawless, one of the poems in literature that one would least want to raise doubts about. And yet there is something terminal in its perfection. At moments it ...”

“... it.Beyond​ their common interest in classical reception, these are both anti-Bloomian books. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, first published in 1973, did more than any other work of modern criticism to establish an agonistic picture of the relation between author and precursor. It placed the fear of belatedness – you have nothing new to ...”

“... seem hardly surprising; nor does the remarkably high status conferred on him by (for instance) Harold Bloom: ‘Browning, in this editor’s judgment, is the most considerable poet in English since the major Romantics, surpassing his great contemporary rival Tennyson, and the principal 20th-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy and Wallace ...”

“... Scott was in touch, however innocently, with people with South African associations. In fact, Harold Wilson, like Lloyd George, has been caught out telling the truth, even if the truth was rather irrelevant. The final pages give a version of what the jury thought, said and voted. The authors know next to nothing of Newton, the man who did the ...”

“... that Zuckerman had an answer, but his logic forced people to put the correct questions. In 1964, Harold Wilson asked Zuckerman to go to the House of Lords and become Minister for Disarmament. Zuckerman very sensibly calculated that he could be more use as a civil servant. In 1966, Wilson sent him to the Cabinet Office and made him head of the Scientific ...”

“... Leigh Fermor’s memory isn’t wonderful – he has no trouble confounding Joyce’s Leopold Bloom with that character’s father, Rudolph Virag of Szombathely, and he has forgotten to restore to ‘Elias Cavetti’ his proper name, Elias Canetti. Minor details, indeed. As a song of the open road, Between the Woods and the Water is a lively, engaging ...”