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“... than the exposition of Shaw, continues to attract so many students. They will be glad to have Ian Watt’s little book, which is informative, authoritative and unaffected. It is part of the Cambridge ‘Landmarks’ series, ugly outside but valuable within, that includes Wolfgang Iser’s distinguished ‘maverick’ volume – disregarding the ...”

“... DOWNING)/Good. Concordances needn’t be all fun-and-games. Indeed, the Larkin editor, R.J.C. Watt, makes a good case for the critical usefulness of his word-lists. He points, for instance, to ‘the extraordinary series of words beginning with the prefix un-’ that can be found in Larkin’s work, and certainly the series, ploughed through at one ...”

“... and Screaming is admirably undecided on the matter of which epoch it prefers. Less useful is Tom Watt’s A Passion for the Game, which pokes about ‘behind the scenes’ of week-to-week league soccer, interrogating the game’s faceless servants, from club secretaries to groundsmen to tea-ladies. Watt says that his book ...”

“... the speakers do not listen to one another. Of the art of Ford’s friend and collaborator, Conrad, Ian Watt writes in his recent book on that writer’s 19th-century texts: ‘The need to derive moral meaning from physical sensation partly arises from the fact that both the impressionists and the symbolists ... proscribed any analysis, prejudgment, or ...”

“... aimlessly from inn to inn. It pays its dues to Tristram Shandy, but is stripped of the novelistic (Ian Watt would have said ‘realist’) attributes of that work: the concerns with particulars, with what makes a character individual, with place and time and circumstance, with the laws of probability. Unlike 18th-century novels, it seems to have no ...”

“... can go back to women born over a hundred years ago. A late (and much missed) Stanford colleague, Ian Watt, once told me that as an undergraduate at Cambridge he was put in charge of escorting Gertrude Stein when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great ...”

“... previous generation had addressed to poetry. He drew on eclectic older critics like John Holloway, Ian Watt and, above all, Frank Kermode – many of his circle, he reports, ‘were covert Kermodians inasmuch as we regarded him as the most accomplished literary critic of his generation’ – but also on outliers of American formalism such as Wayne ...”

“... whose members also included Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, Thomas Day, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. William Hutton was also in touch with the ‘Lunatics’ and hence not merely with advanced scientific, religious, educational and political ideas but with a new sense of the shifting balance of social and cultural power in late ...”

“... more than itself, insisted on its contaminated but victorious description of the world (what Ian Watt called ‘the literal imagination’). In beautiful words, he writes that if fictional forms appear in shapes preposterously false we will reject them; but they change with us, and every act of reading or writing a novel is a tacit acceptance of ...”

“... kind of thing better done than it has been done before.’ A Celebration includes an extract from Ian Buruma’s study of anglophilia, Voltaire’s Coconuts (1999), which discusses Pevsner in terms of the clash between ‘nativism and internationalism’ – a conflict which, Buruma suggests, he embodied without ever resolving. The objections, which rumble on ...”

“... called his stupendous scheme of commercial revival and stock-jobbery in Paris his Système, while Watt actually built a steam engine in the precincts of Smith’s beloved university. Unlike Hume, whose deathbed became a raree-show as he calmly countenanced extinction, Smith could not quite dispense with final causes. With the deployment of a highly ...”

“... morality, but The Accidental Woman is clearly the work of a young man who’s read Murphy, Watt and First Love. The allegiance to Beckett is chiefly signalled by a studied disdain for the conventions of realism (‘Here you are to imagine a short scene of family jubilation, I’m buggered if I can describe one’), along with some suitably cryptic ...”

“... spirit of feudalism rife and rampant in the midst of the antagonistic development of the age of Watt, Arkwright and Stephenson! Nay, feudalism is everyday more and more in the ascendant in political and social life.’ Wiener comments that ‘as capitalists became landed gentlemen, JPs and men of breeding, the radical ideal of active capital was submerged ...”

“... music always returns. The outside world now mainly sees Protestant Belfast in terms of Ian Paisley Snr, a man who believes that bridges are built primarily to let the Devil in. But the bridges of Morrison’s music have connected Hyndford Street outwards to a strange semi-mystical realm of angels, children and (ultimately) the Calvinist Nirvana of ...”

“... make Lough Foyle into Mannanen, the longest sea lough in Ireland, and turn Ernie McCleery into Sam Watt or the Bubble. Was it Rankin’s Hotel I mentioned? Not at all, it was the Dolmen Bar – named for the famous dolmen in Kilclooney, a place so small it’s hard to find on any map. ‘Would Kilclooney mean church field?’ I ask Barry as we sit in the bar ...”