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“... The Tennis Court Oath. It’s harmless fun (don’t tell the Language poets), but once you’ve read a few hundred specimens you start to think: surely the point wasn’t to give over the entire typewriter factory to the monkeys. Most of these poems, though, are instruments of a daft sweetness. For a guy born when the bee’s knees were the cat’s ...”

“... This is not an easy book to read, even though it is written clearly and at times elegantly; its authors have swathed and encumbered their interpretations in so many reservations and second thoughts that it takes some attentive detective-work to discover their meaning. One is reminded of the famous lines in which Horace celebrated the daring of the first navigator: Illi robur et aes triplex Circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci Commisit pelago ratum Primus ...”

“... examination, and transfer to St Elizabeth’s Federal Hospital for the Insane. In 1957, Forrest Read put forward the view that the movement within the Pisan Cantos from hell through purgatory to a glimpse of paradise recapitulated a similar movement within the poem as a whole, and thus brought it to a triumphant conclusion (though Pound rather thoughtlessly ...”

“... Frank Kermode’s lively little book History and Value, and I thought of him again while enjoying Richard Cobb’s Something to hold onto, whose title would itself have been greeted with fellow-feeling by Bagshaw. Anthony Powell’s character is fascinated by things for their own sake, an attitude not common among either believers or men of ...”

“... enter into the phenomenon of Peterley Harvest, a novel composed by the librarian and bibliographer Richard Pennington and offered to the world by him and his first publisher – in what spirit it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and ...”

“... from Bohemia to Bataan, often on the same page, sometimes in the same paragraph. It is hard to read as a result, full of non-sequiturs and begged questions, as if it were glimpsing history from the window of a fast-moving train. There are numerous quotations but no footnotes, an added irritation where, as all too often, the quotation is made to stand for ...”

“... and ends neatly in fat little feet and hands.’ If the personalities Carlyle observed or read about were not so vivid in real life, his zest for portraiture made them so. His present-day biographer inherits a tradition of controversy dating back a full hundred years. James Anthony Froude, the first of the succession, had been Carlyle’s friend and ...”

“... in an atmosphere far removed from the inns and bars of the waterfront. Here you could read the international press and discuss the state of the world. If you tired of intellectual debate, there were five billiard tables at which you could play, usually for money; there was whist, also played for money; or you could drink coffee and smoke the clay ...”

“... everywhere. As late as the 1960s, chemistry undergraduates in Oxford were made to learn German to read the latest research. The German model of higher education was widely copied, especially in the US. The Germans took the lead in the so-called ‘second industrial revolution’ of the late 19th century, based on the electrical and chemical ...”

“... of what is known as ‘literary biography’ suggests that there is a large audience eager to read about literature, but one that is not to be persuaded that the works of their favourite authors can be understood only in the detailed historical context in which they were produced, or only in reference to some elaborate theory of writing or reading, or ...”

“... to me, and what dangers they inferred I ran, or whether they acted out of something they had read in a manual, but, when, at the age of 13 years and four months, I was about to go to boarding-school, they told me, in the middle of one week, that, the next Sunday morning, instead of going to church, I would get on my bicycle, and go and see Dr ...”

“... with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in London, even though the mystery turns out to be not soluble at this level. My second reading was helped by the author’s explanation on Kaleidoscope and elsewhere, which gives the game ...”

“... rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s ...”

“... happiness in later life hard won. Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester in 1882 to Richard Pankhurst, a radical barrister, and Emmeline Goulden, his stylish, much younger wife. A second child, she would always claim that her pretty elder sister, Christabel, got the lion’s share of attention – though, amusingly, the third ...”

“... though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have to, non sine ira et studio) owe a great deal to Robert Wallace. He has translated eight hundred pages of very tough German as lucidly as literalness permits. (We also owe a lot to the MIT Press series ...”