“... she met Yeats, was part of the spirit of the age. In 1891, the year before George’s birth, Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose the thing “medium” has done more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest form of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything ...”

“... have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound art-historical tome containing solid articles on every Kubrick ...”

“... the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and Goethe. Here is the Göttingen physicist and aphorist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writing in 1776, a quarter of a ...”

“... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from the ...”

“... took the young writer up and immediately began helping him. He led him to read Malraux and Thomas Mann, and also to study political economy. ‘I don’t wish to be ignorant of leftist literature any longer,’ Ellison wrote to Hughes, hungrily. This was the reader in Ellison, who had devoured the Tuskegee library while still studying music. ‘workers of the ...”

“... of humour, and for some of its enormous length, JR suggests that Gaddis might succeed in joining Mann and Naipaul in that strange and frosty club.The opening sentence of the book is admirably focused and efficient (‘ – Money … ? in a voice that rustled.’) and the whole first scene has a welcome if oblique element of exposition. The lawyer Coen needs ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... humour … Finally, facetiousness, honest to its own failing.’ She is writing here about Thomas Mann). And she did it when she spoke, shifting pitch and tone and precise degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the ...”

“... to get to sleep at night. He was now travelling regularly to New York to see his psychiatrist, James Shea, in an attempt to stave off his depression. Whether Shea helped him is questionable; what is certain is that Berryman emerged newly fascinated with psychiatry and his own buried psychological issues, especially the suicide of his father just before his ...”

“... have since formed the central argument of the spirited study by the young English historian Harold James, A German Identity. In a lively sketch, James suggests that historically, German conceptions of their identity as a nation moved through a sequence from cultural to political to economic definitions in the late 18th and ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... career of Alexandre Dumas, though England was not far behind with Harrison Ainsworth and G.P.R. James. It was at this point that the historical novel started to acquire its modern ambiguity. Most literary genres have included a variety of registers, and as the Russian Formalists always emphasised, their vitality has typically depended on interactions ...”

“... former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, a fugitive from America since being prosecuted under the Mann Act for his liaison with a teenage white girl. Cravan said of him: ‘After Poe, Whitman and Emerson he is the greatest glory of America.’ There was a background of artistic interest in boxing at this time, but although Braque and Picasso made drawings of ...”

“... a film with the Rothschilds’ money’, because he’d cast Stéphane, the daughter of Baron James-Henri de Rothschild.) On the last day of the shoot, Vercors’s wife returned home early and complained that the German officer had shown more respect for their house than the film crew had. ‘But Madame,’ Melville replied, ‘the German wasn’t making ...”

“... like a year. I went to make some money and spent all of it while I was there.Was that when you met James Dickey?He played bluegrass music and he had this lake on his property and was forever showing off his muscles and thighs. At one point he said: ‘Yes, I’m so big, I’m so goddamn big! And no cocksucking English critic’s gonna tell me any ...”