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“... The meanings​ of its title sit a little heavily on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, originally a novel by Iain Reid, which Charlie Kaufman has now adapted as a movie (on Netflix). Out of context, I’m Thinking of Ending Things strongly suggests the possibility of suicide. In context too, as it happens. However, in both Reid and Kaufman’s versions it also evokes time, ageing, dementia, loss, what things look like before they go ...”

“... reached the hospital in Cracow where Trakl was under psychiatric observation just too late. Trakl had died at the age of 27 of a cocaine overdose, a response to the Battle of Grodek. He left behind a poem that expresses the suffering he had witnessed: At evening the autumn woods resound With deadly weapons, the golden ...”

“... version of The Waste Land, and is dated ‘24 Saturnus’, invoking a playful calendar he had invented for the new era marked by the completion of Joyce’s Ulysses. In 1950, D.D. Paige, the editor of Pound’s Selected Letters, mistakenly translated the date as 24 December. His error was noted by Hugh Kenner in 1973, but his correction escaped ...”

“... first on her list is Nicholas Moore. Not just the publishers, but pretty much everything else had failed for Moore. The son of the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore, he had begun to publish poems in his teens. Though his father had sounded out the Hogarth Press, Nicholas looked like he ...”

“... 1928. The chests, however, were bequeathed ‘without the contents’. In many ways, posterity has had to make her up. She’s been conceived as a latecomer (‘one of the last Victorians’) and a forerunner (Eavan Boland discerned ‘an ominous pre-Auden elegance of tone’ in her work). Perhaps she’s a little like T.S. Eliot’s Cousin Nancy, who smokes ...”

“... well, by the standards appropriate to those participants. The men, according to Forster, ‘had a two hours walk in the glorious country’ between Greatham and Arundel. Lawrence told Forster ‘all about his people – drunken father, sister who married a tailor, etc: most gay and friendly, with breaks to look at birds, catkins, etc. Last night we ...”

“... a wine glass and a bottle beside her, amid a spill of papers. Her husband, Eugen Boissevain, who had been her caretaker during their happily-ever-after of almost three decades, had died of cancer the previous year. She was living alone at Steepletop, their estate near Austerlitz, New York. A servant found her in the ...”

“... without, hitherto, having studied the iconography. Aldington’s best-knownbook, Death of a Hero, had appeared in 1929, and was eminently suitable – or unsuitable, as you look at it – reading-matter for the very young in the early Thirties. For anyone interested in poetry and – in the shadowy way of adolescents – himself a poet, Aldington existed also ...”

“... wouldn’t want you back’), and the frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary life of San Francisco. But much of his poetry has ...”

“... of ‘poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind’. These poems had an implosive quality, as a result of intense pressure being applied to a spare vocabulary: ‘What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and ...”

“... read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honours thesis on the marriage plot. Madeleine’s thesis grew out of a seminar in which a teacher argued that ‘the novel ...”

“... the more nuanced. Brown adds to our understanding of such matters in one respect. Inside a had book about Modernism, there is a potentially good book about the relationship between Lewis and Joyce, the two most rebarbative members of the group. Their mutual influence has long been a matter of claim and counter-claim, but Brown does give some substance ...”

“... In the summer of 1913, Jacques Copeau, the French stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes and design for an innovative production of Twelfth Night. Grant completed the commission, using fabrics from the Omega Workshop for the costumes, and went over to Paris the following February to attend rehearsals and install his work ...”

“... of her rejection of a literary life and her refusal to foster a public image. Although she had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her ...”

“... bombing raids at a pub in the Chiltern village of Fingest. Opposite this was a house where Bernal had for some years been living with Margaret Gardiner and their son Martin – then a most undisciplined small boy, but now, I understand, a highly distinguished Chinese scholar living in the USA and certainly heir to his father’s intellectual gifts. Bernal’s ...”