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“... the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without introduction he tells his latest joke. This morning’s was told originally by Walter Matthau.A newly married couple. The husband ...”

“... exploration; she was witnessing the formation of the American Studies canon – Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Henry James and Faulkner. The New York intellectuals, they told Beauvoir, sought ‘a civilised literature that aims at both formal perfection and a deeper grasp of the world’. She was looking for something else, ‘the effort of writers to ...”

“... borrowed from Thomas Mann’s novella ‘Tonio Kröger’. Other poems work over passages of Melville, Jonathan Edwards, Cobbett, Thiebault and others. A good many of the autobiographical poems in Life Studies are cannibalised from Lowell’s 1950s prose memoir, fragments of which survive in the Collected Prose as ‘91 Revere Street’, ‘Antebellum ...”

“... the idealism to choose a more distinguished field: philately. He got a job in the Strand with Fred Melville, one of the two or three most reputable of London stamp dealers. He loved the work, and indeed remained a stamp collector all his life. Melville gave him every encouragement and he had no desire to leave, but he had to ...”

“... that many or most of the figures who recreated modern writing were gay, or Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy. But he would have been slightly unsettled, I think, by the thought of the gay element in this list, and by the idea ...”