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“... nowhere more than in the comedies and farces of the 1730s, eight of which appear in this volume of Thomas Lockwood’s edition of Fielding’s drama. A third and final volume of plays is in preparation, and will complete the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding – a heroic project, begun in the 1960s, which has now outlived all but three ...”

“... The more I try to describe why it was compelling the worse it sounds. You had to be there.Patricia Lockwood is blunt about the difficulty of transposing the internet into literature: ‘All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues.’ Explaining a meme confines it to a dusty museum. We peer at it ...”

“... cruelty and by the desire to redress, must falter finally with Willie, and must falter with Thomas Havens.Havens is one of the host whose speech makes up the patterns of Lincoln in the Bardo. They are motley, their vernaculars range from low to high, from timid to enraged to [redacted], in the case of poor abused Litzie. The difference is the great ...”

“... Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song about him ‘fiddling’, which is ...”

“... A frightening Build-a-Bear arrived from my publicist. The ceremony I had come for (the Dylan Thomas Prize) came and went without me; I actually won, which seemed like the funniest outcome. Caspian, my agent, showed up in the lobby one morning with a crystal book and a cheque, and Jason and I laughed at our reflections in the gold elevator as we carried ...”

“... properly weights down – no one else is there. Certainly, there are no students, no Thomas Pynchons, no Ruth Bader Ginsburgs. The word Eigengrau means own grey, or intrinsic grey, or brain grey. It is what you see when you close your eyes. After a while you are in Nabokov’s own grey, turning down corridors, coming on the characters in their ...”

“... the abandoned child in The Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go ...”

“... Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his ...”

“... experience of office? 1 January. Delighted to see a CH for Eric Hobsbawm and a CBE for David Lockwood in the New Year Honours. Would either have been honoured at all without the change of government? David, although Britain’s number one sociologist, is almost the only academic I know who is wholly without the vanity which Max Weber called the besetting ...”