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“... the harsh power of clichés is invoked.’ He can be pedagogical while being platitudinous: Christina Stead ‘resists the evil reductionism of our culture and never “totalises” the self (an ugly but useful word)’; ‘In great fiction the language is not only satisfying in itself, but it also fulfils larger purposes of design.’ This ...”

“... Pavese’s novels; or of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy; of Bohumil Hrabal; of Christina Stead; of Henry Green’s Loving; or of V.S. Pritchett’s short stories – Pritchett, who was told by H.G. Wells in the 1930s that the working classes could not be written about without comedy and condescension. All these writers thought Mr ...”

“... like The Verse of Christopher Brennan, by his two old friends, A.R. Chisholm and J.J. Quinn). Christina Stead is only one of the subsequently luminous names who later said that they were inspired by his lectures, no matter how chaotically delivered. But it would have been strange if he had been anything less than inspiring. He knew a lot and was ...”

“... indulgences. But Theobald, by the power of the cross, commanded the demon to preach in his stead and even placed his stole around the woman’s neck. Though unwillingly, Abrianus preached with such power that eight hundred men came forward to take the cross. We may take such tales with a grain of salt, but demon preachers appear in other sources ...”

“... the security of the Saints, then by quite abolishing the Laws of England, and setting up in their stead the Canons of Beelzebub, and A Treatise written in defence of his seizing on the Boy’s Close-stool-pan, and reserving the contents for his own profit, because the Lad was so profane to carry it on a Sunday, by ‘Alderman Atkins, Shit-breeches’. The ...”

“... canonisation in the US has proceeded so rapidly. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (the line is Christina Stead’s but Wallace used it twice in his fiction and once in an essay, in reverse; Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of ...”