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“... Such arduous processes were nonetheless used to produce vast quantities of text. The late Michael Clanchy estimated that the English royal government put out around thirty thousand documents a year as early as the second half of the 12th century. Using the ingenious method of calculating the expenditure on the wax used to seal documents, Clanchy found ...”

“... adds up to something less than our old imagined intimacy. We knew them better before we knew them.Michael Ragussis says this scene is ‘the exact opposite’ of an apocalypse. ‘The poet is not exalted through vision. He escapes nothing except falsehood.’ I agree there is no exaltation here, but there is surely some sort of apocalypse – a ...”

“... out of joint; sleep the sleep of death; sweeter than honey and the honeycomb; whiter than snow; oh that I had wings like a dove for then would I fly away; the meek shall inherit the earth; tender mercies; clean hands and a pure heart; I have been young and now am old; my cup runneth over; many a time; clean gone; the days of old; I am a worm and no ...”

“... could not express; for regions, places, landscapes, vistas, movements of the seasons, trees, rain, snow, dawn, sunset, outer and inner weather; and for times not our time.’ I think this argument works, more or less, for Blood Meridian, the novel McCarthy published before he started on his trilogy. This novel is set in Mexico and the South-West of the US in ...”

“... memory attached to smell: that of the chinchilla fur that belonged to my mother. A smell like snow in the air mingled with a little camphor. I believe that there is a sexual element in this memory although I cannot call to mind anything at all that might bear on this. According to the nuance of my memory of the fur it must have been some kind of ...”

“... doom. Two little girls are abandoned on a small island with nothing to watch but an old video of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and nothing to eat but melted cosmetics (‘Dogs Go Wolf’: it’s not a bad story). A mother falls off a bar stool while changing a light bulb in a borrowed weekend cottage (‘The Midnight Zone’). She suffers concussion and ...”

“... in Norwegian. What you got out of these writers, like the wrong kind of leaf, or the wrong kind of snow (though these were native productions), was the wrong kind of novel. The 1980s in particular were Kundera’s decade. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), a highly conceptual and not really catchy title, relaunched the Kundera backlist: The Joke ...”

“... coat. Thin flaxen hair fell over his forehead. The boy sat drinking tea from an earthenware mug, snow melting onto the floor from his worn-out boots beneath the table. He broke off big chunks of rye bread. When he had finished, he gathered up the crumbs from the table and poured them into his mouth.Paustovsky finds himself almost ambushed – mugged – by ...”

“... as much as they do a growing maturity. ‘The Apotheosis of Tins’, for example, appeared in The Snow Party as a prose poem. In his new book, which is of the species ‘poems new and selected’, it appears rewritten in lines, and he has revised it in other ways, too, but not to much effect. It is still an invigorating piece of writing, and the key to a ...”

“... narrator returns to Switzerland his roommate is stranded in another part of the city because of a snow storm and has to phone to say goodbye. That’s pretty much the plot of ‘The True Pure Land’. The story is all resonances – it’s ‘naked’ of action, but in Stamm’s sense ‘warm’. In another story, ‘Fado’, a man has a night to kill in ...”

“... couple’s honeymoon in Italy, Herzog goes off on his own to climb Etna, but gets trapped in the snow and is late back. After waiting for him for a couple of hours, Ganna sets off into the snowy night alone, summons the carabinieri, and when he finally returns hurls herself at Herzog ‘with a piercing scream, like a madwoman’. When they get back to Vienna ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”

“... studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken ...”

“... Bullshit.’ On the campaign trail, when a student asked him what he would have done about all the snow that hadn’t been ploughed in Queens that winter, Mailer said he’d have pissed on it. One night he called his own supporters ‘spoiled pigs’. It was well known that nine years earlier he’d been arrested for stabbing his wife. ‘The difference,’ he ...”

“... tour there is always a pest who asks questions. What, he wonders, are the colleges like today? Did Snow give an accurate account of Christ’s? What about the way Nevill Mott was treated as master of Caius that led to his resignation? What of the delectable days of Lord Dacre in the Lodge at Peterhouse? Surely space could have been found to praise the ...”