Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s tomb at Durham, presumably mixing up George Eliot and Adam Bede.Q. Where in Oxford would you find a crucifix that had been gazed on by Pascal?A. Campion Hall. (It is a Jansenist crucifix which comes from Port Royal.)Q. What had A.E. Housman in common with the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... sessions with Anna Freud; but perhaps the biggest inspiration was the young German aristocrat Adam von Trott, who was a Rhodes scholar when Astor met him at Balliol in the early 1930s and formed what Lewis describes as an ‘extremely potent friendship’ with him. Von Trott enchanted everyone he met at Oxford – Isaiah Berlin was ‘completely ...

The German Question

Perry Anderson: Goodbye to Bonn, 7 January 1999

... tradition was dimorphous. Its contribution to movements of the Right – figures like Novalis or Adam Müller were, after all, ultras in their day – is well-known. But its influence on the Left was critical too. Benjamin, whose One-Way Street emits the first flashes of ecological warning in the Marxist tradition, came out of the turn-of-the-century ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... example of the imagination’s power of happy realisation: ‘The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.’ The vision of Eve that Adam undergoes in the Garden of Eden as God extracts a rib is the type of the dream come true.For Keats, this is what medicine ought to have been able to ...