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“... preceding the divorce (Teddy had embezzled and spent some $50,000 from her trust), Henry James couldn’t help regretting ‘that an intellectuelle – and an Angel – should require such a big pecuniary base.’ But require it she apparently did; and in the later decades of her career especially, she appears to have been capable of driving some ...”

“... to combine a large territory with political stability seems to have caught the attention of James Madison, who offered a parallel vision in the tenth Federalist paper, thereby fulfilling Hume’s hope that ‘in some future age, an opportunity might be afforded of reducing the theory to practice ... in some distant part of the world.’ That was not a ...”

“... with more fillers than prizes. The best things are from the youngest contributors, such as James Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst, and the less youthful A.E. Ellis. Each here performs the same narrative trick, telling some resonant or portentous tale through more or less awkward or impercipient or blindly obsessive observers. In Hollinghurst’s ‘A ...”

“... Seaport mall development, ‘shopping is the chief cultural activity of the United States.’ James Rouse, founder of the Rouse Company, which designed South Street Seaport in the 1960s and invented the first enclosed shopping malls, said malls were the future in the cities too; shopping, he thought, was the answer to urban decay. He had his eye on Fulton ...”

“... seeds of an undulate-leaved rhubarb from somewhere east of the Urals: but the claims which Philip Miller was excitedly led to make for what came up from them proved, alas, ill-founded. Linnaeus had better success when he described another rhubarb from Russia as Rheum palmatum in 1750: with the backing of his authority this was to remain Europe’s favourite ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... fascinate the postmodernist generation, and led to important essays by Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller. Wolfgang Iser’s study of Pater was crucial to the genesis of reception theory at the University of Konstanz in the 1960s.Pater reportedly told his students that ‘the great thing is to read authors whole; read Plato whole; read Kant whole; read Mill ...”

“... more realistic dramas including the finale of the most popular of all the toy theatre plays, The Miller and His Men. This ends with the defeat of the brigands after which the mill explodes.The toy theatres must have caught fire regularly, as did the originals on which they were modelled. Covent Garden burned down in 1808; the following year so did Drury Lane ...”

“... speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the moral ...”

“... Charles Davenport, for instance, speculated in 1915 that ‘factors’, which he labelled C and E for ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘excitability’, combined in human reproductive material to yield general personalities which he described as ‘choleric’, ‘nervous’, ‘calm’, ‘cheerful’, ‘phlegmatic’ or ‘melancholic’. But the important ...”

“... offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who ...”

“... a racial melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight ...”

“... They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of the dove of the Holy Ghost and handed on to Luther the baker, bent over his kneading tub. The Church hierarchy refuse the product. Behind looms a peasant with his flail, while a dragon shrieks excommunication. This graphic ...”

“... who constitute a priesthood: ‘the death-of-language writers are self-ordained priests’ (James Stalker, in Greenbaum). John Silverlight, in his excerpted columns about usage and abusage that constitute Words, is prompt to make clear that he is playing down, not laying down, the law: ‘What I am not, to the disappointment of some colleagues, is a ...”

“... It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.             Henry James, Life of Hawthorne But, first of all, is there a history of silence?    Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Literary history? Can there still be people who believe in it – or them: literature, history, literary history? Are not all texts on the same level, just texts? Is history not something synchronic, merely a different way of talking about language? The views implied by these rhetorical questions seem wrong to many people, myself included ...”