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“... returns with elliptical reports from which the tribe’s younger storytellers, from David Foster Wallace on, set about extracting a style and a tone attuned to new ways of feeling and not feeling. One constant throughout these risk-filled spirit voyages has been DeLillo’s superbly take-it-or-leave-it posture towards the laity. ‘The writer leads, he ...”

“... the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a ...”

“... without leaving London or even going to the exhibition: the Van Dycks in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection and the Queen’s Collection which have not been lent for the exhibition are at least as powerful as the portraits that have been. But what we couldn’t otherwise have seen without going abroad is the florid Catholicism of the religious ...”

“... linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... The difference between ‘selected’ and ‘collected’ poems, Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter in 1954, is that ‘people read selected poems but don’t buy them’ and ‘buy collected poems but don’t read them’. The symbolism of a collected volume worried him: ‘A book that contains everything that one has done in a lifetime does not reassure one ...”

“... overcrowded urban epicentres simply moves the virus into new territory. As Rodrick and Deborah Wallace, two public health researchers from New York, have noted, there will be ‘spread from larger, more socially dominant central cities to smaller ones along the transportation network ... and from central locations to suburbs’. This phenomenon is exactly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the longer, posher vowels of my mother, who was born and brought up in Surrey. Her father, Grandad Wallace, had been a miner in Barnsley. One day, the story goes, he got on his bicycle and cycled down south. He reached Ashtead, in Surrey, saw a pretty lane overhung with trees, and said he was never going back. My mother still ended up in Yorkshire – and in ...”

“... allowed only 45 pages out of 390 in J.E. Neale’s Queen Elizabeth (1934), a mere 26 out of 447 in Wallace MacCaffrey’s Elizabeth I (1993): which is as much as to say that those were not biographies at all, for one does not have to be a Freudian to know that what happens to you before you are 25 matters more than anything which follows. Those early years ...”

“... course, exactly how events and memory both proceed: associatively, digressing, jolting, looping. William Burroughs makes the same point when discussing his cut-up technique: ‘Take a walk down a city street … You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of ...”

“... some sense of it all. Burns was in love with anybody who bravely rose against established power: Wallace, the old Covenanters, Prince Charles Edward, Washington, Mirabeau and maybe even Danton. It was the means – the act of rebellion – rather than the motley ends which made his heart thump. While Burns enjoyed making his pen run away with him in his ...”

“... a cousin and former lover of the once successful but now forgotten Victorian historical novelist William Ainsworth. The deadliness of Ainsworth’s prose is a running joke, and it enables several asides of the ‘don’t whatever you do write a historical novel’ kind, as well as various self-conscious observations about the horrors of literary ...”

“... admired by – many of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke, Arna Bontemps, Wallace Thurman and Hurston. Patronage was also forthcoming: Charlotte Mason, a white widow in her seventies who dreamed of founding ‘The Harlem Museum of African Art’, began not only inviting him to her Park Avenue apartment and having him squire her to ...”

“... raped by one of his associates. This charge appears in a summary of phone recordings written by William C. Sullivan, one of Hoover’s lieutenants. Experts on King’s career have questioned the reliability of Sullivan’s account. Like Hoover, Sullivan was committed to ‘completely discredit[ing] King as the leader of the Negro people’. A judge has ...”

“... on her fellow student Peggy James, Mary ‘courted’ her too (‘courted’ is Leavell’s word): William James’s daughter was very much ‘our kind’, and since Mary expected her family to live together always, she could only assume that Peggy would be joining the household – whether as Marianne’s partner or Warner’s was immaterial. But Marianne’s ...”