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“... It’s apparently the style and not the opinions that he would have wished to disavow, though he may also have wanted to forget the poverty-driven hack work of his early years. What we know of his views on racial or imperial matters is not consistent with such a show of racial animus. Even his unillusioned anti-Rousseauist notions about savages or the savage ...”

“... years before the great innovator created it for the writing of history – and he overdoes it, as may happen to a parodist in any age. Style or anachronism, either criterion by itself may be enough to condemn a product once it has come under suspicion for other reasons, such as dubious provenance or a motive all too ...”

“... Why do we enjoy tragedy? It may be thought that our best hope of answering this question lies in the psychology of Freud, who disclosed the dark side of the psyche. Behind this darkening of the mind, however, there lies another darkening, of our picture of the ancient sources of European literature. Antiquity, formerly given over to the Ego, becomes the province of the Id ...”

“... been rising out of my past to express surprise that I ever should have amounted to anything. You may not believe it but I am going to have to thank one fellow for remembering the days of ’81 when we went to kindergarten together and once cut up a snake into very small pieces to see if contrary to the known laws of nature we couldn’t make it stop ...”

“... the science of government, which human understanding seems, hitherto, unable to solve. If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth; if every dreamer of innovations may propagate his projects, there can be no settlement; if every murmurer at ...”

“... what he calls ‘this conservative tendency’ as ‘a species of need’:The form it takes may be some version of a repetition compulsion, a need to grind out some rendering of an old and usually self-defeating pattern … But mixed in with the apparent need to repeat, another (and opposing) motivational system, or need, is operating as well, one that ...”

“... of abusing their charges. In the case of Congleton it appears that some fifteen other adults may also have been involved in child sex: it was a ‘sex ring’ – a vague expression which is nevertheless surely correct in its implication of group commitment to a particular sexual practice. It is also reasonable to suppose that the signals reaching ...”

“... famous, as gifted writers do – what else is there to do but write?’ That rhetorical question may on first reading seem to strike a bleak note, as though all else had lost its savour, but in context it gestures towards an inner imperative, that achieved condition of the writer, whether critic or novelist, in which experience is not fully possessed until ...”

“... Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a narrative, and a non-prescriptive approach tends to sap the narrative. What will constitute a ‘happening’ in the narrative, and how one happening will be represented as leading to another, must vary ...”

“... group in Paris and some of their acquaintances. Seven meetings were held between January and early May 1928, five between November 1930 and August 1932. The first two reports were published at the time in La Révolution surréaliste; the other ten were unknown until a French edition edited by José Pierre appeared three years ago. This translation has an ...”

“... Die Abwicklung der DDR, show British diplomacy in a particularly sorry light.) To this catalogue may be added the Government’s obstructive posturing on European integration, its confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a ...”

“... Swede’, he wrote. Edmund Wilson accused her of failing at characterisation and storytelling: she may be a ‘good craftsman’ but she has ‘an anemia of the imagination’ and is given ‘to terrible lapses into feminine melodrama’. Discussing ‘the subtle failure of her admirable art’, Lionel Trilling saw Cather’s emphatic nostalgia as a rejection ...”

“... on very friendly terms. Rembrandt’s portrait of him remains in the Six house in Amsterdam (which may be visited by special appointment) and is painted with astonishing freedom, but less heavily and roughly than usual, the painting of the gloves and cuffs coming close to the manner of Hals. Alpers notes this and observes that it ‘must betoken an ...”

“... apparently ubiquitous when one creature attempts to convey information to another. The dawn chorus may enchant or irritate at 4 a.m. but, if it irritates you, spare a thought for the singers, who are exhausting themselves in the effort. As is the kudu, when it wields its enormous horns, or the lyrebird dragging its fantastic tail, or the Great Bustard, in its ...”

“... on. He had hoped that Wittgenstein would approve of what he had been writing, but when they met in May 1913, Wittgenstein told him that it was all wrong, and, as Russell admitted to Ottoline Morrell, he did not know how to answer Wittgenstein’s objections. He never published the whole of what he had written, and it is likely that what he did publish was the ...”