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“... counting up imagined ways in which his friends had let him down, failed to conceal their scorn for him or edged away in some other manner. I was irritated, and I said: ‘You know, Karl, in many ways you are a perfect love-child.’ To my surprise, he was delighted with that. Yes, a love-child he was. As I got to know more about his background, I began to ...”

“... the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to suppress dissent. It is thought to be an illusion for the reason that both the form and the content of a discourse are not self-generated, but have the shape they do by virtue of relationships (of similarity and difference) with other discourses that are themselves ...”

“... manner is ‘fuck off!’, or, as he responded when somebody once had the courage to reproach him for his selfish behaviour: ‘Fuck off. No, fuck off a lot.’ The issue of offensiveness is one of the recurring complications at the heart of any attempt to arrive at an overall assessment of Amis: of his quality as a novelist, his significance as a cultural ...”

“... and wasn’t due to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to ...”

“... it is clear she has entered into erotic conjugation with a Norseman. She won the Booker Prize for Possession (1990) and tried for it again with The Children’s Book (2009). Her last work of fiction was Medusa’s Ankles (2021), a selection of stories that stands for the whole.I have ...”

“... could surely have done better. One of his favourite lines of poetry was Hartley Coleridge’s ‘For I have lost the race I never ran’ and early on in his career he got used to being spoken of as having squandered a great gift. Part of MacCarthy’s charm was that he had no serious quarrel with this view. In 1932, he decided – was persuaded – to issue ...”

“... start with two small complaints. Unlike Fletcher, Karlin doesn’t give explanatory notes, except for a few dialect words and phrases in foreign languages. Reading Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week,’ you have to know or guess what a hunks is. Fletcher tells you it’s a ‘miser’: And it’s often very cold and very wet,   And my missis stitches towels ...”

“... frontiers, as if he’d corroborated some long-held suspicion’. The change could be disturbing for old acquaintances. Margaret Gardiner, who met Auden in the 1950s for the first time since before the war, was shocked at ‘his face … unimaginably creased and craggy’: ‘it took me some time to rediscover the young ...”

“... opinions will become part of a legally enforceable literary canon. One could be forgiven for thinking that the main defenders of the canon today are government ministers and the right-wing press. A GCSE board’s decision to prescribe a Frederick Forsyth novel a few years ago was subjected to a bruising examination by the tabloids. The press and the ...”

“... if we speak of the Sitwells as curious antiques, literary-historical exotics, to be treasured less for their work than for the memorable put-downs they engendered: Geoffrey Grigson’s ‘Old Jane’ assaults in New Verse; F.R. Leavis’s crack about the Sitwells belonging to ‘the ...”

“... A writer, born around 1890, is famous for three novels. The first is short, elegant, an instant classic. The second, the masterpiece, has the same characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingly interested in myth and language games. The third is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course ...”

“... manuscript, and were on the whole not moved to try to see it. But when ‘Grandison’ was offered for auction at Sotheby’s in December 1977, it was examined closely, perhaps for the first time, and the experts apparently concurred in finding that the play was essentially by Jane Austen after all. Brian Southam, in the ...”

“... problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never without a book, whether bound for a tutorial or the local A&E, for decades he disappeared off for tramping holidays or conferences anywhere from Catalonia to Cuba the moment term ended. One friend, on holiday in southern ...”

“... under a fairly conventional notion of the poetic; his early lyrics have been much commended for their effective use of assonance and alliteration, but it is still widely assumed that his later political and philosophical interests diluted the purity of his poetry. But it is at last possible to survey his oeuvre as a whole: two volumes of Complete Poems ...”