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“... wrapped up in themselves; and so it is nice to learn from Reid that the young Hughes loved James Thurber. ‘Alright, have it your way: you heard a seal bark,’ exasperated wife complains to anxious husband in the marital bed, while from behind the headboard a seal, unseen by both, looks attentively at something we shall never see. Thurber’s ...”

“... and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for ...”

“... modes of death and the sensations of dying’: the survey conducted between 1900 and 1904 at Johns Hopkins University Hospital by Sir William Osler, one of the founders of modern clinical medicine and perhaps the most distinguished physician of his time. He found – based on reports by his colleagues and students – that while 90 out of about five hundred ...”

“... interests produced a potentially subversive treatment of republicanism in Sejanus: but he became James I’s court poet, and Paulin deals fairly brusquely with Jonson as a conservative monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ...”

“... in The Disappearance of God (the others are De Quincey, Browning, Emily Brontë and Gerard Manley Hopkins), even though the book is profoundly concerned with its subjects’ own hesitations and hoverings between literary engagement and disengagement. That – in the 1960s – was then, and those were different critical times. But now, nearly half a century ...”

“... seems to reveal something about me that I’d rather not look at. It carries what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘the inscape’ out. ‘Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind,’ Confucius said. Graphology, as I’m sure you know, is the study of handwriting as a clue to character analysis. Hard to believe it isn’t a good clue.If ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... Berle), economic planners (Rexford Tugwell) and social-welfare liberals (Harry Hopkins). This was the heterogeneous group that lay behind the American version of the welfare state. A flurry of legislation followed; dams and highways were built; electricity was brought to remote rural areas; there was regulation of finance capital; people ...”

“... became a guide and friend to many enlightened, doubtful readers. It was because of the Elegy that James Boswell would, at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the ...”

“... lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends. They met in an LA hospital in 2009 (she was there for a heart procedure and he for the birth of his ...”

“... novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin described Native Son as a modern-day Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy’, arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘admits the possibility of his being subhuman’ and that Wright was no ...”

“... He has killed her erstwhile pimp (Gary Oldman being allowed to overact as if he was the Anthony Hopkins of the underworld) because he didn’t like the idea of the man’s continued existence, and because it’s what he thinks Elvis would have done. When Slater tells Arquette he has killed Oldman, she starts to cry, and Slater gets upset. Is she grieving ...”

“... She was friendly with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and Roth met Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe at her salon on 61 Morton Street. She set out to make an intellectual of him in the manner of Henry Higgins, Kellman says, and he suspects that her mentoring of young Jewish men – Roth and Winter weren’t the only ones – was ...”

“... happen significantly faster than previously believed. One of the authors of the first study was James Hansen – perhaps the most respected climate scientist in the world. He warned that, on our current emissions trajectory, we face the ‘loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s large cities and all their history’ – and not in thousands of ...”