“... Freud as an ally for his vision of pragmatism. Rorty, that is to say, explicitly embraces Harold Bloom’s ideas about the creative misreading of texts, as he creatively misreads Freud’s texts for his own purposes. He is explicit that reading is ‘a matter of reinterpreting the past so as to make it more suitable for one’s own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to take bets that resurrection is ruled out. Thirty years ago John Updike gave us in Rabbit Run Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the basketball-player lately wed to tippling slatternly Janice Springer, who failed to cope. When baby Becky drowns through the negligence of Janice, Rabbit runs away. In Rabbit Redux, the title elegantly lifted from Trollope, Rabbit ...”

“... performative, grunting exercises: ‘This week, reading Joyce Carol Oates’s gruesome story after Harold Brodkey’s maundering about Brando was like a chocolate sundae on top of a banana split.’Along with the big-name, high-price blowhards were some specimens of nouveau riff-raff that Brown had hauled over from Vanity Fair. To Michael Arlen, the New ...”

“... But anyone looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn elsewhere. Sharing Harold Bloom’s commitment to ‘the transcendental strain’, Vendler differs over how we should read it. What she values is less the Sublime than its epistemology. While Bloom cries up the heroic Emersonian in ...”

“... and particularly Surrealism are gutted; without Freud, Thomas Mann is a windbag, Molly Bloom an imbecile. So why is Freud not discussed at length? Could it be that Gay needs to downplay the darker aspects of the modern? In his memoir about his youth, appropriately entitled My German Question and published a decade ago, Gay spoke of the ‘deeply ...”

“... corner of Westland Row and Pearse Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is ...”

“... the Tate catalogue essay which is Chapter Five here) has made a large contribution. But as Harold Rosenberg remarked tartly of Giacometti, ‘an artist who interprets his own creations rarely lacks collaborators,’ and Giacometti has had several. There is Genet’s account of the artist and his work, and of having his portrait painted. There is James ...”

“... Phone boxes have always been ‘obscene’. One of the accusations levelled against Leopold Bloom in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses is that he telephoned ‘unspeakable messages … mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in D’Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox’. In Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris ...”

“... has coloured my entire life and works,’ Fitzgerald declared in a letter to his literary agent, Harold Ober. But it wasn’t just money: Brown’s biography shows the ways in which he consistently favoured the aristocratic, the premodern and romantic. As a child, he loved to pretend he was the foundling son of a medieval monarch, denying his parentage (like ...”

“... robust (and married) older one, come forward at this late date as if he were already one of Harold Bloom’s ‘strong poets’. Bloom’s idea of the ‘strong poet’ is adapted by Rorty in his revisionist definitions of pragmatism, and designates a writer who, as Bloom puts ...”

“... life’; he didn’t keep up with reviews or gossip. He told Poirier that when he first visited Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London in 1913, he’d had no idea who the Imagists were. ‘You should know your fellow countryman, Ezra Pound,’ Monro said. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Frost replied.It was an odd narrative to insist on, given that ...”