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“... on the first part of this passage ran: ‘This seems to me rather good, considering I had not read a syllable of any book on the subject, but had thought it all out for myself – beyond having just heard that there was a Greatest Happiness Principle, and having wondered why anything so obvious was called a principle, or how any one could dispute it – I ...”

“... proceeds: ‘I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are ...”

“... and ‘the smell of hay still opens a path to the farthest and fondest places in me.’To read Heaney’s memories of his early life is to find not only rural, familial experience (hauling sacks of grain, buying eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain ...”

“... on page 7 of Lykiard’s Introduction). Did Ducasse choose the pseudonym? He had certainly read Sue, and Caradec emphasises the appeal of Latréaumont the character (‘a kind of cruel clown, a moral and physical monstrosity’) to the creator of the ‘diabolical’ Maldoror. Or was the name proposed by Lacroix, Sue’s publisher as well as ...”

“... I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas ...”

“... is uncharacteristic, a flicker of hesitation such as Leavis does not usually allow himself. Read the chapter on Hard Times and you discover why he loved this, the most tendentious and merely emblematic of all Dickens’s novels. He dwells at length on the practice of Gradgrind in the classroom and the dire consequences of his supposedly utilitarian ...”

“... but it was a voice which an actor would have envied, as you noticed as soon as he started to read poetry aloud. It was deep but capable of great variety in its modulation. It has always struck me that the argument of his essay on the audible reading of poetry is a little weakened by the fact that he could read poetry ...”

“... Maeve and Deirdre – were around the same age, were cordial but not close. Maeve learned to read at the age of three and spent her childhood buried in books and writing in her diary – the traditional refuges of imaginative, incompletely happy children. She was good-natured, independent, wilful and precocious – a source of pride to her parents and of ...”

“... be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to? Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is more than 150 years old. What would/ should/do you want? The impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible? For a start, you would probably want it ...”

“... and the Attlee Government, lost their places on the National Executive to Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to ...”

“... odd little book is eventually going to turn into a mock-judicial arraignment of the great lover. Richard Aldington (The Romance of Casanova) likewise adopts a God’s eye-view, makes Balbi a lay figure called Marco and invents a barmy alternative outcome whereby Casanova is recaptured and brainwashed. Sabatini, who as a gifted linguist could have worked ...”

“... canonical works of black male autobiography that have surely shaped Gates’s political thinking, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, for instance, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Colored People is not an angry, still less an incendiary work; its predominant tone is nostalgic and ...”

“... in some ways rather proper, had a taste for the risqué: his literary adviser in the early days, Richard Le Gallienne, poetaster, philanderer and drinker, had an instinct for the mood of the times. The Bodley Head rapidly became a succès de scandale as well as modestly profitable for some years. Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Ricketts were among the ...”

“... have been written by another author. The writer Lucia Berlin most puts me in mind of is the late Richard Yates, better known as a novelist, but who also wrote two remarkable collections of short stories: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. Yates’s technique is a good deal more familiar, and his writing more polished, or cooked, than ...”

“... for Helen Smith, a 23-year-old nurse from Yorkshire who worked in the same private hospital as Richard Arnot, a surgeon. What actually occurred at the party is still the subject of dispute, and is related to a pending legal action. But everyone knows what happened afterwards. The following morning Helen Smith’s body was lying in a courtyard beneath the ...”