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“... of torture to her: making promises it couldn’t keep; showing caring messages covered in love hearts that instantly disappeared, never to be found again; lighting up, at all times of day and night, with graphics and noises only her grandchildren could decipher. Every day was a digital Golgotha. She felt scourged by technological advances and ...”

“... you are. Anglophilia showed itself in the magazine’s politics (Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross describes him praying for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the English can do a certain kind of novel ...”

“... though they exhibit a considerable variety of interests, sociological, historical, theoretical; in Harold Bloom’s case ordinary language is defeated, for we need some such compound as cabbalistic-rhapsodic. None of them shows much interest in British writing, or the British literary scene, or in literary criticism as it is now practised and taught ...”

“... did not take long for me to learn that sophisticated art aficionados weren’t supposed to love or even like Chagall.’ The so-called New York intellectuals, most of them young enough to have been Chagall’s sons, were suitably ambivalent. Irving Howe dismissed Chagall’s ‘softened and sweetened’ version of the shtetl. ...”

“... At some point it must have crossed Braine’s mind to call his latest novel ‘Love at the Top’. The hero is Tim Harnforth, a 56-year-old best-selling novelist and man of letters. Originally from the West Riding, he is now one of the gens du monde, ‘a high-flyer, a metropolitan man’, literary-lioning it in London ...”

“... not in sounds, echoes, national resonances. Stones of the Wall, though deeply concerned with love between men and women, is quite remarkably different from The Lover – and ‘goes into English’ more easily. Here is Marguerite Duras describing two Frenchwomen with Chinese lovers: ‘Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of bodies they ...”

“... a professional trajectory, about intense preoccupations and about meetings with remarkable men (Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Lacan etc), not about wives and children or, indeed, meetings with remarkable women. It is, unusually, a memoir without alibis, without a palpable design on the reader. As a critic Hartman never takes over, but he doesn’t believe that ...”

“... of the book, for Mary McCarthy’s first husband was the actor, scriptwriter and embryo playwright Harold Cooper Johnsrud, with whose activities she was closely concerned before she left Vassar at the time of her marriage. They parted after a few years and Johnsrud died in 1939 of burns received when trying to rescue one of his manuscripts from a fire in his ...”

“... Moreover, he combined this mere knowledge with social qualifications of a high order. Harold Nicolson admires the way ‘he wheedles things out of old ladies.’ There is more to it than that. He has just the right tone when he makes sympathetic noises to those who deplore the moral decadence of the English people, and enough decadence of his own ...”

“... In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist and bishop, smooth muscle physiologist, inventor of the safari ...”

“... while hiding cautious disclaimers here and there. One is that Matilda, while a teenager, fell in love with an Anglo-Saxon ambassador to her father’s court, one Brihtric ‘Meaw’. After he’d gone home, she sent him a proposal of marriage: ‘an astonishingly audacious act’, as Borman approvingly comments, ‘in an age when daughters were expected to ...”

“... governments, had sometimes personally suffered at the hands of the military, and had no great love for Argentina, we found the unanimous view that the Malvinas Islands were an extension of the South American Continental Shelf, and self-evidently belonged to the South American state four hundred miles away, rather than to some European state eight thousand ...”

“... and thus we see, on our topmost towers, the Philistine armed and winged, and without the love or fear of God or man in his heart, doing battle in Nietzsche’s name against the ideas of Nietzsche. No one can think and escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and will pass before Blake passes. That is Arthur Symons, who had all the ...”

“... of Europe, as compared to America, which has been fashionable ever since Stephen Spender’s Love-Hate Relations. Philip Toynbee, in the Observer, came right out with it: ‘by now it is hard to see any reason why an American writer or artist should wish to settle either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another ...”

“... chosen for the pleasure of imagining someone else seeing them. This is an important aspect of love in a diary – you imagine the loved one reading it, and giggle all the more at the thought. Pym is better than almost anyone at the feel of being in love, which is a solitary matter shared with the diary self: no lover ...”