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“... amplify or judiciously correct Ray’s version. No one has, or ever will, supersede him. Margaret Forster in 1978 attempted an imaginary autobiography. Ann Monsarrat’s brisk Thackeray: An Uneasy Victorian is strong on the Mrs Brookfield imbroglio. The best of the post-Ray efforts is Catherine Peters’s psycho-biographical Thackeray’s Universe (1987). I ...”

“... covers the later Victorian rhetoric of death scenery, through Modernist modulations in Conrad, Forster, Lawrence (a romantic throwback) and Woolf, to a conclusion in the Post-Modernist and supra-national fictions of Beckett, Pynchon and Nabokov. The strongest element in Death Sentences, as in Stewart’s earlier Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, are ...”

“... his loose economic principles and his childlessness in the doctrine of present gratification; E.M. Forster could muster only two cheers for the democratic state, reserving three alone for ‘Love the Beloved Republic’. Subversive stuff, all this, to Professor Himmelfarb and to our own age of economic austerity, which seems to require a similar austerity in ...”

“... as the court of Sarat Bose. None of the confinement to their own egos which is so obvious in Forster or Ackerley, seeking to define for themselves what they saw and to be funny about it. And yet Chaudhuri is present too, in all his quiddity as an individual. As one of his epigraphs he quotes Pascal: ‘When confronted with a natural style one is both ...”

“... is never seen but in a hand accustomed to tools’. The information on Doyce’s origins came from Forster, and as Forster remarks, Dickens departs from the facts in not making Doyce well-born. This may suggest how very unusual, and even doomed to failure, was Babbage’s combination of the intellectual and the ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he did of Galsworthy’s. The only Lawrence he is recorded to have read is Lady Chatterley, from which, like the unlearned readers who ...”

“... from the lift. When they begin, Butts is living with a lover named Eleanor Rogers but also seeing John Rodker, an aspiring writer who is chiefly known today for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”

“... The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent ...”

“... in our sense: indeed it would have specifically disowned our use of the word. So would E.M. Forster, whom F.R. Leavis accused of ‘not knowing how serious he was’. And our trouble today may be that because we take seriousness seriously we take Bloomsbury too seriously. Virginia Woolf has become an icon, academically hagiographic. Lytton Strachey, on ...”

“... existed, apart from the great pines and lilacs which were there already, seems doubtful. E.M. Forster, who came as tutor to the children, declared that he could not find it. But it was certainly at Nasserheide that she created the new version of herself – witty, elegant, formidable, sensual, aristocratic, impayable. Resentment at her marriage and ...”

“... student, made a forceful case for this idea as applied to the work of Firbank, Hartley and Forster. His novel takes up the idea in asides: ‘It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it,’ Will remarks to a boyfriend reading The Go-Between, ‘the unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart.’ The most extended and moving treatment of the theme comes with ...”

“... cheap, and indeed looks very cheap as long as the cost of maintaining libraries is not counted in. John Burrows’s project of putting a dozen novels onto a computer was plainly from the first going to prove expensive. When one begins to cost Burrows’s travel, subsistence overseas, and time, together with computer-time, programmer-time and secretarial ...”

“... centrality in British culture. Characteristically feeble echoes of this assault were evident in John Major’s recent sneering at ‘progressive theorists’, but some years ago the real emotional dynamic was laid bare, indecently bare, by (as usual) Norman Tebbit, who extolled ‘the man in the pub’ against the upper-class ‘cocktail set’ on the ...”