Search Results

“... sex; for posterity, it lies in practically everything else – the minutiae of daily life that ‘Walter’ provided without thinking twice about them. The same is true of Victor’s Confessions: his detailed descriptions of sex acts quickly pall, and the narrative of his degeneration into a pederastic masturbator is both lugubrious and boring. But the ...”

“... The longevity of artists creates special difficulties for their critics. Ideally, from a critical point of view, artists ought to follow Keats’s example and die young, leaving behind a tidy oeuvre about which coherent generalisations can be made. Too often, however, artists survive to an unreasonable age, passing through phase after phase, advancing and regressing with no steady rhythm, every year or so tossing a new stumbling-block into the path of those who would like to understand them ...”

“... When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, not everyone was gratified. Clive Sinclair begins The Brothers Singer with a quotation from a BBC radio interview broadcast minutes after the award had been announced: the ‘astounded’ interviewer suspected that ‘some kind of American Mafia’ was at work in the Nobel Committee, while the ‘serious’ Professor Bradbury, discounting this theory, ascribed Singer’s triumph to ‘the domination of American writing in the world today ...”

“... could be contained. Klein’s daughter Melitta left for the United States in 1945 with her husband Walter Schmideberg, and mother and daughter remained unreconciled to the end. The last fifteen years of Klein’s life saw her consolidate her command on psychoanalysis in England, a command achieved at the cost of alienating a number of her erstwhile supporters ...”