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“... the topic of adoption had entered the ether … That was all. Yet the next week I was meeting Blake Watson. Blake Watson was the obstetrician who’d delivered the Erskines’ adopted daughter. Three months later he rang Didion and her husband to say he’d just delivered ‘a beautiful baby girl’ to a mother who was ...”

“... These six volumes are crammed with comédie humaine and the parliamentary puppetry that seems, as Blake said, something other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes paragraphs and believes in calling a bastard a bastard. Inevitably, such an ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... draws one of the sacred texts into the field of implicit condemnation. The penultimate line echoes Blake on the ‘harlot’s curse’ (this is not the only Blakean moment in the book), and therefore perhaps fleetingly adduces an alternative tradition of literary ‘song’ and ‘recklessness’, even of ‘prophetic’ political sentiment, as an ultimate ...”

“... at UCL have often gone to people with a foot in the literary world outside the academy. David Masson, who succeeded Arthur Hugh Clough at UCL, wrote an immense Life of Milton, ran his department with great success, and in his spare time edited Macmillan’s Magazine. His successor Henry Morley was, as Sutherland says, ‘a heroic populariser’, a ...”

“... like – and therefore on the same level of achievement as – Eliot, Yeats, Mandelstam, Lowell, Blake, Pasternak. Ricks pretends to discover a mystic complexity in pure platitude and bathos: The hyphen cannot but acknowledge, in the moment when it conceives of two things coming together, that they are nevertheless two not one, just as Hill’s need not ...”

“... and then put out to dry in the sun, pinned up in shawls. Mr Scobie reads the Bible and William Blake, and then he makes up little riddles. One of them is about dying – but nobody wants to hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine without ...”

“... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake or Emily Dickinson used religion, as they used the context of childhood responses, to appeal directly to an audience over the head, as it were, of literature. Their communication seems to short-circuit it. The tactic was understood and developed by the ...”

“... Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather less, in the way of personal detail, than the recent study by David Coombes. There is far less about Sayers’s marriage, for example; but we do not feel – at any rate, I did not feel – that this is a case of suppressio veri. More an exercise in getting things in perspective. Yes, Sayers was a vicar’s daughter who ...”

“... uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present ...”

“... to the undermining of Britishness. One reason for this, as the Party’s historian Robert Blake comments, is that Tories have always tended towards English nationalism, enjoying electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent protracted ...”

“... a true, original language of men, that is as engrossing a political idea as it was when William Blake learned of the real, original language of nature from the Swedenborgians. Given that we do not yet possess a social theory of language that can acknowledge deprivation without attributing stupidity to the disinherited, we can say that, though his work ...”

“... but it would be more accurate to describe him as the ‘evil genius’ of his brother-in-law David Séchard, printer, inventor, mere technician and thus true man of the 19th century, who pays dearly for being over-impressed by Lucien’s intellectuality. ‘His fatal, innocent error is to suppose that Lucien’s lofty gift is superior to his modst ...”