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“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... Aki did indeed come home with him: but once there he was temporarily reconciled with his wife Mary, and no more was said about divorce, at least not for a while. Aki was installed in a room in London and set to work on Leigh Hunt in the British Museum, where her researches were to be a great help over the years. She settled down stoically enough in her ...”

“... dwarf railway engineer’, and, more disturbing to Vinnie, the pubescent Camden Town schoolgirl Mary Mahoney, a punk goblin who demands payment before she will recite her obscene playground rhymes. Not only is this variety of tone a relief: it operates cunningly as the objective correlative of the psychic drama inside Vinnie Miner-Minor’s head, as she ...”

“... fan and pendant vaulting of the Lady Chapel, Elizabeth I is buried on top of her sister, Bloody Mary, who put her in the Tower of London. Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had executed, lies (head, of course, separated from body) in her own tomb, almost exactly opposite Elizabeth’s; ...”

“... to get off with George Moore – or so he said. “George Moore would have said that of the Virgin Mary,” said B.B. [Berenson], “if he’d ever heard of her.” ’ But is it witty or humorous to predicate that George Moore hadn’t heard of the Virgin Mary? Like self-love, ill will is a busy prompter but not much of an ...”

“... the Blake of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion may justifiably be claimed as a sister to Mary Wollstonecraft in the struggle to vindicate the rights of woman. And, most alarmingly in a book that advertises itself as a guide to the poetry as well as the life, it completely misses the point of the poem, which is that the cabinet is by no means a ...”

“... was that of an educated man of the world who had read Marx and Freud rather than R.W. Chapman and Mary Lascelles, and it proposed an alternative both to the old-style Brahmins and to the new-style technocrats of American graduate schools. Edmund Wilson, who in his maturity became a more pugnacious personality than Trilling ever was, maintained a steady and ...”

“... Europe to Britain reverses the route that Lionel Verney takes to escape a plague-ridden Britain in Mary Shelley’s proto-SF novel The Last Man. It’s unlikely that the echo is accidental: the Gothic is another genre that Glavinic happily borrows from. On his second night in Britain, Jonas makes it as far as Lancaster before he falls asleep. He wakes in ...”

“... then abandoned) during the same horror-writing game at the Villa Diodati house party at which Mary Godwin conceived Frankenstein, Byron’s friends found the episode infuriating. John Cam Hobhouse recorded his vexation: I have got into a correspondence with Polidori about ‘The Vampyre’, which he wrote and got vamped up, and then attributed to Lord ...”

“... experiment undertaken by ‘the modern Prometheus’, as the subtitle of the novel describes him, Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein. For the Romantics the myth served as both an image of potentially fatal transgression, and an inspiring political allegory. ‘Of thine impenetrable Spirit,’ wrote Byron in his 1816 poem ‘Prometheus’, ‘Which ...”

“... in a slyly intense ‘spiritual history of the suburbs’ which posits, of mundane Mary and the otherworldly angel, that ‘the closer the two figures appear to be, the more the mystery between them deepens.’ For the suburbs too are haunted, by ‘scavenger angels’, their genius loci a child always ‘out to play’ and at night ... an ...”

“... Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lady Cynthia Asquith, the Honourable Dorothy Brett, Catherine Carswell, Mary Cannan, Amy Lowell and, later, Mabel (Dodge Sterne) Luhan. He accepted their money (Frieda was not above writing begging letters), their offers of houses and their hospitality, which to a couple on as low an income as theirs was a godsend. In return Lawrence ...”

“... during her twenties; she translated Prometheus Bound twice before composing Aurora Leigh. Like Shelley she thought of Prometheus as a radical. But there was also an autobiographical impulse. Confined to her sickbed by a mysterious illness, she identified with his bondage. That much is clear from her 1832-33 translation. When she returned to the tragedy a ...”

“... and his sense of it, is a very contemporary one: it is post-Romantic and post-Nietzschean. Shelley seems old-fashioned beside him, a man still living in a settled world of religion and ideology. Yet at the same time Keats’s art, and his true sense of it, is extraordinarily ‘conservative’, as that of the common reader usually is. His most natural ...”

“... once cheated his mother-in-law out of enough money to buy himself a boat, and that her mother, Mary, a stout woman with a ‘boneless, soft prettiness’ and the ‘scarcest of eyebrows’, was a devout Presbyterian who believed that to get married was ‘sort of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas ...”