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“... Karloff’s monster in Bride of Frankenstein. He’s not alone. ‘I prefer my subjects dead,’ Fred Kaplan confesses in the prelude to his ambitious biography of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than ...”

“... French Revolution, his private letters, and elsewhere, he dashes off one vignette after another. Fred Kaplan quotes one of the less well-known of these cameo portraits, depicting the French historian Thiers: ‘a noticeable subject ... with the light eupeptic practical Gascon spirit very strong in him, has a most musical, plaintively-singing, and yet ...”

“... absent-mindedness) what produced a narrative as symptomatically distorted as An Autobiography. Fred Kaplan begins his Dickens: A Biography with the event that makes writing a biography of Dickens so frustrating. On a fine September day in 1860 the author had a gigantic bonfire at Gad’s Hill in which ‘the accumulated letters and papers of twenty ...”

“... of overall shape – something that even famous lives lack in the day-to-day business of living. Fred Kaplan’s 1988 life of Dickens began with the vivid scene of his incinerating ‘every letter he owned not on a business matter’ in a bonfire at his Gad’s Hill garden. What Kaplan ruefully implied by opening with ...”

“... whole Henry James story – read it again, if you have already read Leon Edel’s biography – in Fred Kaplan’s new biography, and it is worth the effort. Inevitably Kaplan covers much of the same ground as Edel (not to mention F.W. Dupee or R.W.B. Lewis), but, taking advantage of the copious Jamesian research of the ...”

“... some delegation, so that in extremis subordinates or military commanders can order nuclear strikes.Fred Kaplan’s 1983 book The Wizards of Armageddon was an invaluable account of early American nuclear strategy. In the immediate postwar period, US military theorists were impressed by the power of what Kaplan called the ...”

“... financial support but resisted him sexually until 1862-3, and that her surrender was reluctant. Fred Kaplan has suggested that the relationship was sexual even before the Dickenses separated, and that there was no reluctance. Whichever side one takes, there are enigmas. Why did Dickens leave Ellen anything at all in his will? A thousand pounds was not ...”

“... will probably move closer to pornography.’) More recent books by Sheldon Novick (1996, 2007) and Fred Kaplan (1992) have served as correctives to Edel’s genteel evasion. A valiant attempt to commemorate James as he wanted to be remembered – for his work – was made by Theodora Bosanquet, his bright, loyal secretary from 1907 until his death. As the ...”

“... Hollywood (1989), Washington, DC (1967) and now The Golden Age. According to Vidal’s biographer, Fred Kaplan, it was while at work on Lincoln, in the early 1980s, that Vidal conceived of the series in its totality (though there were earlier links, 1876 being a sequel to Burr, and both introducing characters who are ancestors of those in ...”

“... began happening to [Henry] James in the mid-1890s, and more frequently in the next decade,’ Fred Kaplan wrote in his biography of James. He began to fall in love with young men. ‘James’s sexual self-consciousness,’ Kaplan continued, ‘seemed either impossibly innocent or embarrassingly explicit.’ ‘I ...”

“... value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes. No discussion of the Lobby would be complete ...”