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“... set, and needs these books as dressing. Apparently, a group gathered at the Statesman to honour William Empson. For surviving. A sane voice in a fox-crazy world. There were lengthy speeches, drinks, more speeches, more drinks, and a presentation. But when the moment came around, and they looked for the great man, the bearded sage, it had to be admitted ...”

“... person of the Undivided Trinity leads to distortions in Art. Thus, in the Sayers scale of values, William Blake is a lop-sided believer in the Father – ‘wrestling with the huge cloudy cosmogonies and highly personal symbolisms of the Prophetic Books’. James Joyce, apparently, was ‘son-ridden’. Ghost-ridden writers have included Amanda Ross (a ...”

“... essays. Observations of the gardens at Chatsworth, culled from a forgotten book by the antiquarian William Stukeley and an unpublished diary by Sir John Percival, make possible a significant contribution to the debate about the models for Timon’s villa in the Epistle to Burlington. Patient research into Chancery records yields an amusing note on ‘The Case ...”

“... Johnson City (the location for Verghese’s story), the percentage of the population who are non-white is listed to reassure prospective visitors (7.2 per cent, for the record). Tourism trades happily on this humiliating past. Henning, the birthplace of Alex Haley; the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April ...”

“... 1950. The later works in both their Collected Poems bear the marks of triumph over silence. Even William Empson – a man Gascoyne records as being ‘extraordinarily unprepossessing’ and whose poetry was a ‘bore’ – largely ceased to publish verse after The Gathering Storm (1940). And sadly he never returned to it. One by-product of the storms that ...”

“... Keith Sinclair, the leading New Zealand historian of the middle and later 20th century, was, like William Pember Reeves and J.C. Beaglehole before him, a man of the Left and saw his theme as the growth of a settler nationalism founded on social-democratic principles; but Belich writes after the appearance of works bearing such titles as The Ideal Society and ...”

“... in the shell itself. This is what the Disney Corporation Inc. had done to all the legends: Snow White, Pinocchio, even Huckleberry Finn.’ So much for the Magic Kingdom. In Australia, the heroine encounters the opposition of entrenched conservatism, which she combats in a healthy spirit of give and take. On her return, the deluge has fallen on ...”

“... girl in the red coat who is first seen in the ghetto, and later heaped onto a pile of black and white corpses. The significance of the moment is lost on Richard and his companion, who are characteristically preoccupied with the technique by which the red coat was created. ‘Do you reckon they painted it on the film with a brush?’ … ‘No way. They ...”

“... and vegetables outside on the pavements. A yard from me, the sun shines on the bald head and crisp white hair of a former terrorist who committed a particularly savage double murder in the Seventies. I watch him smiling and talking to various people who pass by. A big camper van swings into the side street. The party activist beside me asks have I read Gitta ...”

“... shooting to the stars’. In moments of rapture, he echoes the post-war rhetoric of Henry Luce and William Langer with his paeans to American righteousness and mission. The United States, he says, is a ‘chosen place’, ‘a city on a hill’, ‘the last best hope of man on earth’. The shocks and disillusionments of the last twenty years, his message ...”

“... of the Oxford family of dictionaries behind its recommendations.’ There it is in black and white – the appeal to authority. Buy our product: no other is guaranteed genuine. The paradoxical (and some might say shameful) aspect of such appeals to authority is that they run flagrantly counter to the basic principles on which modern lexicography was ...”

“... essays. Out of the window – if these experts are right – goes Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel ...”

“... is that a responsible and formally coherent account, much influenced by authorities as diverse as William Empson and Julian Pitt-Rivers, seems not to be powerful. I hope this can be said without being taken as part of some (Tom) Pauline conspiracy of Irish bull merchants. It is not at first sight a ‘political’ problem, since one of the things that ...”

“... a single sentence, sounding perhaps a little less fractious than it looked all alone on that white sheet of typing paper and inscribed above the signature in his tiny, measured hand. What I’d written about Fidelman and The Fixer, he informed me, ‘is your problem, not mine’. I wrote right back to tell him that in time, he might come to see that by ...”

“... to church bells, the cries of children playing outside, or the purring of a large, fat black and white cat? One sound is as likely and evocative as another, if you must import sound at all into a work which – unlike Picasso’s Guernica, or Edvard Munch’s The Scream – offers no tangible encouragement to the viewer to supply it. But at least the Vermeer ...”