Search Results

“... for us squeamish art-lovers to accept, but much less potent. Speaking of trapdoors and false fire, Lawrence Lipking regrets that Mozart should have ‘spent his genius on an outmoded moral relic, thrilling but not serious’, yet old myths are serious, and they die hard. To get his Faust off the hook, it took Goethe something like a verbal quibble, and ...”

“... results have too infrequently been matched. If you don’t believe me you should take a look at Lawrence Lipking’s dreary ‘Life of an Author’, which deploys a frenetic academic semaphore in order to say things that Boswell says by noticing a cough or a sniff. Lipking’s book is more in the tradition of Sir ...”

“... of the English poetic career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter ...”

“... correct in holding that European literary-historical criticism begins in the 18th century, and Lawrence Lipking right that the arts were historically ordered in England at that time. It seems not to have been noticed that Dryden (‘Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ and much following) gave us our conception of a literary ‘age’ or ‘period’. The ...”

“... Encyclopédie, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776), and the more specialised works studied by Lawrence Lipking in his important book, The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England – Charles Burney’s History of Music, for example, Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art and Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets. The Oxford History of English ...”