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“... of Apollinaire, Picasso, André Salmon and Max Jacob were drawn to Jarry, who lived fast, died young and left an unbeautiful corpse, more or less suicided by poverty and drink at 34 (the autopsy indicated tuberculous meningitis, but it was absinthe that did him in). This grim end only added to his posthumous allure. The Dadaists claimed him as a ...”

“... and famously unwilling to paint or sculpt portraits. His one ideal body type – that of a young, athletic man – was minimally adapted to represent women or old men. There is a drawing here which works out the pose for a Virgin and Child. In it Mary’s body could be mistaken for that of a naked man. When players swap shirts at the end of a football ...”

“... Paul Watkins’s novel and Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque are second books by young British writers whose work has been well-received in America, to which, together with its surrounding seas, both of these writers have been drawn. Paul Watkins used, they say, to set off from Eton for spells on an oil rig, and after graduating from Yale he fished for three years off the New England coast, where this novel of his is located ...”

“... inflating advances), who senses Stone’s loss of faith in his masterpiece and would rather have a young disciple like Russell overseeing its publication. And McInerney gives a convincing account of the growing estrangement between the young couple, Corrine getting disenchanted with the markets just as Russell becomes ...”

“... Richardson is the Hugo, hélas! of the 18th-century English novel, as Coleridge might have said: ‘I confess that it has cost – still costs my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire – aye, greatly, very greatly, admire Richardson/his mind is so very vile a mind – so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent ...”

“... Parayre, was arrested, along with the disgraced family. His son-in-law, ‘a dashing but penniless young artist’, was widely considered guilty by association, and ‘from 1905 onwards, Matisse’s work was regularly dismissed by the critics as an attempt to pull a fast one on the public’ Biographers are often buttonholed by interesting minor characters ...”

“... he have suffered? There aren’t any clues in the plot. The eligible Prince de Clèves falls for a young noblewoman of uncommon beauty, and proposes to her; she accepts, though more out of duty than out of love. The besotted Clèves is swiftly disenchanted; his bride spends little time with him, and becomes broody and temperamental. Her ...”

“... models, yet the voyage that produced this sage and magnanimous book must be counted as a triumph. Hugo Williams made an American voyage also, but he might as well have stayed home. No particular place to go records the trivialities and absurdities of a poetry-reading tour from New York to California and back. Where Raban finds unexpected depths, Williams runs ...”

“... and find other ways to ruin your career.’ But then Meadows read Lynne Olson’s book Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power in 1940 and Helped to Save Britain (2007). He ‘felt a flash of recognition’: Boehner was Neville Chamberlain, autocratic and obstinate, but willing to suck up to tyrants (Hitler/Obama). He, Meadows, was a ...”

“... their casual love affairs, Lamartine celebrated the sentimental migraines of their wives, and even Hugo, in his great plays, discharged in their direction tirades about humanity, progress, the march of truth and all kinds of nonsense in which he does not actually believe. Various others, curbing their ambitions, like Eugène Sue, have written novels for the ...”

“... not considered up to scratch. Only Eduardo Chillida, well-known on Fifth Avenue, gets in, with the young Cristina Iglesias as token promise. People may barely notice, because for decades the PNV’s nationalism has been rousingly defined by exclusion rather than inclusion: that is, by opposition to the Spanish state, from which it has wrung juridical and ...”

“... Michael Young’s biography takes Bronislaw Malinowski to the age of 36, when the brilliant Polish anthropologist completed his field study of the Trobriand Islands, married, and prepared to make his career back in Europe. Young is a Melanesian ethnographer himself, and the book comes into its own when Malinowski arrives in Australia, on the eve of the Great War, and begins the expeditions to Papua that effectively marked the beginning of modern anthropology ...”

“... putting themselves in competition with historians, who are usually accorded more patience. Victor Hugo would be forgotten today if all he had written was Ninety-Three, his fictional version of the Terror and the Vendée rebellion (though the book made a deep impression on the young Stalin, for reasons that now seem too easy ...”

“... his first articles and appeared for the first time as a public speaker at a government-sponsored young writers’ club. His applications for a place at the University and on a film course were turned down; called up for military service, he was not allowed to finish an economics degree at the Technical High School, but in the army he wrote together with a ...”

“... their often disparate specialities have never previously been explored. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo feature among the less familiar scholars, and some painters, including Bonnington and Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We learn, for example, that the ...”