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“... Married, happily it would seem, for five years to Eileen Mulligan (who 35 years later, as Eileen Simpson, now a psychologist, would write Poets in Their Youth, easily the most clear-eyed, intelligent and compassionate record of what it’s like to live with and among poets), he had begun an affair, the first since his marriage, with the wife of a young ...”

“... In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders. As the film (which is based on a novel by Susanna Moore) unfolds, and the ...”

“... less for their work than for the memorable put-downs they engendered: Geoffrey Grigson’s ‘Old Jane’ assaults in New Verse; F.R. Leavis’s crack about the Sitwells belonging to ‘the history of publicity’; Larkin-Amis’s prize ‘for the book of the year combining the greatest pretension and the least talent: it is called The Osbert’ (Larkin’s ...”

“... of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a mental tyrant, a thief, a philistine enemy of poetry, a narcissist incapable of ...”

“... poets who are poor, miserable and mad, who amount to nothing. For the purposes of wit, the Habbie Simpson stanza form, used in ‘The Vision’, is a vehicle which can on occasion serve almost as well as the heroic couplet. Burns says here that so far in his life he has ‘done nae-thing’ except write poems, while the Lass of Ecclefechan complains elsewhere ...”

“... anxious years trying to fill. The experience of death, which also took his sisters Elizabeth and Jane, was decisive for Thomas, and not healed by the simultaneous experience of having a cold mother. Elizabeth de Quincey was Evangelical, rather aloof, and able, in the manner of Evangelicals, to shield her dislikes and enmities behind an apparently impersonal ...”

“... following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his ...”

“... of his co-ordinates are firmly fixed in the cultural map of ‘then’. He was born in the year of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the ...”

“... Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick to detect a snub and fiercely proud. He claimed he first took opium as a palliative for toothache. But it ...”

“... III. The librarian at Windsor had been one of many who had urged on Her Majesty the charms of Jane Austen, but being told on all sides how much maam would like her put maam off altogether. Besides she had handicaps as a reader of Jane Austen that were peculiarly her own. The essence of ...”

“... bodies, and transmitted images of Iraqi civilians killed by one of our smart bombs. Senator Simpson of Wyoming promptly labelled Arnett an Iraqi ‘sympathiser’. The criticism even extended to Ted Turner, who was labelled ‘Baghdad Ted’, an appropriate consort for ‘Hanoi Jane’. Military and political leaders ...”

“... talks; normally he’d smoke through his lunch hour. He’s wearing long jean shorts and a Homer Simpson T-shirt; his eyes are ringed with yellow-blue shadows. ‘To be honest, this place takes so much out of me,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to pull away when I get home. I certainly swear at home more because I’m allowed to, but other than that ...”