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“... bombed, directionless, wasted, disillusioned America – ‘the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life’, in Truman Capote’s words. And so cosmic preoccupations, heavily mysto speculations about the Big Picture, keep breaking through the conventional surface of the narrative like fat wax-headed weeds through city tarmac. Tom Wolfe ...”

“... as Yeazell shows us, Darwin like other contemporary scientists was unwilling to deal: ‘savage’ life stands for that which has fallen away from the natural order, tumbling into the pit of licentiousness and abomination. ‘Good Englishman that he is, he much prefers animals to “savages” and prefers them because he imagines them as ...”

“... Fame, the ambiguously titled (bitter to whom?) and extraordinarily hostile biography written by Anne Stevenson with the assistance of Olwyn Hughes, this criticism suggests that something terrible about Plath herself, a kind of plathology, is the source of lies, distortions, perversions and obsessions. At the other extreme has been a polemical feminist ...”

“... remarked) resembled ‘growing potatoes in a cellar’, wild and motherless, neglected by their savage and withdrawn father, cut off in their remote Yorkshire parsonage from all civilised pleasures and practices, the interests of the girls sacrificed to those of their worthless brother. Charlotte’s role in this version of things was that of designated ...”

“... child’ who speaks a kind of ‘gibberish’, and who will later be variously labelled beast, savage, demon and lunatic. It’s clear that this little Caliban has a nature on which nurture will never stick; and that’s merely an English way of saying that he’s quite possibly Irish. Later in the novel, Heathcliff will stage a mysterious disappearance ...”

“... in 1970, he was walking to a bar in Minneapolis one evening in the mid-1950s with his second wife, Anne, the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable’. For a long time ...”

“... desk with spots before his eyes, ‘a green cloud of bile’, and Volume II. It will be ‘a wild savage ruleless very Bad Book ... reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages and places,’ he writes to Emerson – a ‘book written by a wild man’, ‘looking king and beggar in the face with an indifference of brotherhood,’ he tells his ...”

“... half-leopard’ and Arnaud suggests that most of Cocteau’s lovers ‘would have a savage, animalistic touch of Nijinsky about them’. The famous scandal of the ballet’s première was partly plotted by the ringmaster himself, Diaghilev. The audience laughed, booed, hissed; ladies cried out during the obscene dances, while, from the ...”

“... shots of places and persons, no violence. They helped create the myth of the Noble American Savage even as they were documenting his suppression, just as Muybridge’s Yosemite views were promoting the savage beauty of the American wilderness while his shots of miners and railroad workers were recording its demolition ...”

“... out that she was left, badly off, and lamented that she would have to let off half of the house. Anne had trained at the Queen’s Square Female School of Art as a screen and furniture painter. Charlotte had been trained for nothing, so she wrote. She wrote slowly, and, like the heroine of New Grub Street, did her time in the British Museum Reading ...”

“... longshoremen and wondering who would buy the next round, and why. Even books are not safe. Lisa Anne Gurr combed through Simenon’s Maigret books to confirm that drinks indicate social class and that Maigret drinks a great deal of beer, brandy, wine and coffee; he has herb tea when ill. Anthropologists anxious to examine the habits of their fellow drinkers ...”

“... neutralise its pain is very much Robertson’s thing. That has made him a very good translator of savage deaths and dismemberments in classical poetry. His output includes great brutal versions of the flaying of Marsyas (‘Hock to groin, groin to hock./That’s your inside leg done:/no more rutting for you, cunt’), and of Actaeon being torn apart by his ...”

“... allegories, the killer dog as an expression of the Revolution which is itself part of some sort of savage unconscious. Teffi must have been aware of similarly dark impulses on the rise in Europe: by 1936, when the story was written, some of her émigré Russian friends had started to flirt with fascism in the hope it would be an antidote to communism. In the ...”

“... the king had her stuffed. Exotic beasts didn’t always find such favour. When Lady Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey ...”

“... a painted-over figure, presumably a self-portrait. The order is thought to be, from left to right, Anne, Emily, Charlotte. Hassall compiled her scene from different sources: Patrick’s profile, with his distinctive high neckerchief (worn, we are told, because of his fear of bronchitis), was copied from a photograph taken late in his life, when all his ...”