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“... element of chance in these matters. [Terence Kilmartin]Chance plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]There is a great deal of chance involved in all this. [Brian Nelson]It’s true that the first English version, Scott Moncrieff’s, has ‘There is a large element of hazard in these ...”

“... or flat, but the third one, in context, refers to things a woman may have at home or be wearing. James Grieve’s ‘on or about a faithful wife’ seems both brave and helpless. To take a more powerful and significant example, how to translate ‘comme la souffrance va plus loin en psychologie que la psychologie,’ the brilliant second sentence of The ...”

“... 20th century, a poetically-minded young man from the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle. It wasn’t a long way, but his trek was a gesture of hero-worship to one of the greatest Scotsmen and largest egos of the previous century. He toured Carlyle’s house and, as some visitors ...”

“... the 1923 naval officers’ war memorial at Mürwik read: ‘Nicht klagen, noch einmal wagen’ (‘Grieve not, but try again’). In the 1930s, the German navy prepared to try again with a new submarine division, but the British continued to misunderstand its intentions. They knew how dangerous a weapon the U-boat had proved to be, and took it for granted that ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... of the Proust translations we have goes for the literal translation of puant: ‘stinking’. James Grieve has ‘rank outsider’ where Scott Moncrieff has ‘pestilent’. It’s true that ‘rank’ is a fine choice if we pay attention to its meaning as something other than an intensifier. But the French really is violent, and even if we take the ...”

“... of references’ without which ‘it is spurious to discuss a long poem like In Memoriam James Joyce’. This sort of background work ought to be done and she seems well-equipped to do it. Harvey Oxenhorn’s book is of a different character. It is a critical assessment of the kind which used to be done summarily in an essay but which modern academic ...”

“... force a rose from the sand. It’s a big, bold blowsy note to open on, and not at all untypical. James Merrill, a poet of some breeding and considerable refinement, once remarked, in his essay ‘On Literary Tradition’, that ‘it’s a bit snotty to nudge the reader too obviously with references to Virgil or Eliot’, but Walcott remains an unashamed ...”

“... escape to Edinburgh’. He gave it to his father, who read it, ‘and went back to his bookshelf: James Bond, Where Eagles Dare’. So Rankin gave James Kelman’s first book to his father. His sort of thing, I thought. Working-class working man against the system. Dad couldn’t read it. Said it wasn’t ‘written in ...”

“... Mrs Colne might be whirling and skipping from the dresser to the iron pots on the old Aga, Sam Grieve the keeper might be back from the woods with birds’ tail feathers as bright as an actress’s plumed hat. Bella at those times was at the sink, invisible in the gloom of the far side of the old kitchen. Her head peered into the sink and her hands were ...”

“... are minor touches in this movie, as in its sequel Bride of Frankenstein, both of them directed by James Whale, which are just mysterious. Why is Frankenstein, called Victor in most versions of this story, including Mary Shelley’s, here called Henry? Why is his friend called Victor? The bereaved father of the little girl drowned by the monster because he ...”

“... the wholesale destruction of posh cars and real estate. The spectre is sorrow. From Batman to James Bond, every hero is grieving, stricken by a loss from which he can’t recover, whether of parents, mistress, wife or daughter. He – it’s always a he, the women in these movies just get to be decorous or evil, much better options – is all twisted ...”

“... technical resource. All five books are quite short, and all have some of the qualities of what James called the beautiful and blest nouvelle, since they are intensive in plot and on the whole refuse the temptation to broaden into novels. This limitation, if that is the right word, is not at all the consequence of any diffidence or lack of skill in the ...”

“... Brag was its making so little of the other ascribed poem in Rawlinson 160: the Epitaph on Elias James. As Leslie Hotson showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but ...”

“... North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at which point the ...”