Search Results

“... When the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu at last meets his idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not intrinsically more ‘real ...”

“... At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse – about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February 1869 ...”

“... Writing in 1842 to his friend Alfred Domett, who had emigrated to New Zealand, Robert Browning enclosed ‘Tennyson’s new vol. and, alas, the old with it – that is what he calls old’. Browning was referring to the two-volume Poems of 1842, whose first volume consisted of heavily revised versions of poems published in 1830 and 1832. ‘You will see, and groan!’ Browning went on ...”

“... 5 November 1988. In the Madison suite of Sacha’s Hotel in Manchester (motto: ‘Sacha’s Only Looks Expensive’), Paul Williams recalls an unrewarding encounter with Bob Dylan: ‘But I shook his hand which was ... and this was at the beginning of the tour ... and things changed significantly during the tour ... he became more sociable, I’ve been talking to a number of people who did see him backstage later on in the tour, but, uh, his hand was very very soft, and it was ...”

“... my tercel back? I was just telling Adela How many birds it struck since May. But Woolford and Karlin don’t notice that closures are what they are dealing with, confidently telling us that ‘Adela’ must be ‘pronounced to rhyme with “May” ’, as in the other poem that ‘Africa’ must be ‘pronounced to rhyme with the other end-words’. No ...”

“... I’ve been comparing Daniel Karlin’s anthology here and there with other anthologies of English verse of the same period (Victoria’s reign 1837-1901) and of the 19th century as a whole. His major precursors are Quiller-Couch, Yeats, Auden, George MacBeth, Christopher Ricks and Ian Fletcher. I don’t intend a Shopper’s Guide, but I’ll start with two small complaints ...”

“... the past with material on the poem’s life in present-day Iran. In his useful new edition Daniel Karlin argues – the case he makes is lively and convincing – that we have been misled by all the greenery-yallery stuff that has enveloped the Rubáiyát for decades, and that a different form of attention to FitzGerald allows a fascinating study in the ...”

“... Ask what has been the single greatest influence on literary research since the Sixties and the answer might be the Xerox machine, the jumbo jet or Jacques Derrida. Ask what will transform literary research in the next ten years and a likely answer is The English Poetry Full-Text Database. This project, whose three serial instalments will be complete this summer, has reportedly clocked up almost a hundred sales ...”

“... money, or to hit a balance between serious appreciation and succès de scandale. An LRB piece by Danny Karlin (2 June 1988) suggested that ‘agents and publishers’ used Acker and her work to peddle ‘ultimate outrage’ as a commodity, and looking back at her life in London, Acker seemed to agree. ‘I’m very well known, and I get tons of ...”