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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the French Revolution, and its reputation went into decline as the Revolution lost its youthful bloom; for a while, indeed, it was totally eclipsed by the Romantic reaction with its factitious liking for the Middle Ages. Before long, however, medievalism became a term of ridicule again, and the Enlightenment achieved a spectacular comeback by transforming ...”

“... slightly pestered by insects it’s an ideal situation, with the lavender bank just coming into bloom and the trees and grass fresh and green after a week or two of rain. It’s one of the perfect places of the earth, utterly silent and private, the twitter of a hawk the only sound. And it’s the last time we shall be able to come. It’s a warm afternoon ...”