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“... she is far more excited by renunciation and by the struggles of Florence Nightingale or Sophia Jex-Blake than by the achievements of her own generation. With its fear that ‘the victims of the patriarchal system’ might become the new ‘champions of the capitalist system’, Three Guineas tries to envisage a psychic and emotional space in which those who ...”

“... even if they did not encourage him in his deviant designs. Among his colleagues at the BBC were George Orwell and Louis MacNeice, both of whom he greatly admired; and there were others, their names by now probably forgotten, who brought conviction and real knowledge to Empson’s side of the fight. One such, Ralf Bonwit, a formidable, dedicated Japanese ...”

“... there are moments when we fall into what can feel like a bottomless pit. Bunyan, like Milton and Blake, is one of the guides we may summon when we find ourselves taking that plunge. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a critic to identify with Bunyan’s dream of truth, but Michael Davies’s lengthy study is remarkable for its failure to empathise with ...”

“... and Goethe that is Hellas, and remains, even through a sequence of undistinguished poems on George Eliot and Dorothy Wordsworth, haunted by the genius loci. There are poems about Venice and London. New Providence claims attention. But Greece exerts the strongest pull, a centripetal appeal. Olympia, Thermopylae, Dodona, Hippocrene: there’s a roll and ...”

“... Civil War, and that Robert Burns mattered perhaps more than Cobbett and certainly more than Blake to the Northern English working class of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine and Cobbett are left out of the story. The land, England within its ...”

“... and even for some a kind of personal cross. Of the leading German Marxist thinkers, only George Lukacs had (immediately) chosen Moscow; and there he was to remain until the end of the Second World War, true to the party he had joined in 1918 and apparently at one with the Stalinist consequences of the Leninism to which he had fully committed himself ...”

“... suppose I could have been a drunk.One used to see Bacon quite often, as he was a regular guest at George Melly’s across the road. The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine ...”

“... to touch on only briefly. The book is extremely fine. But it slightly lacks the element of what Blake called ‘mental fight’; its romance is only just not mood music (the touching absurdity of the fall at Lyme Regis has its place in this). Conceivably a symptom of that sense of defeat in life which may psychosomatically have induced Austen’s fatal ...”

“... Philip Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.’ It is a wonderful, uplifting quote, even if the translation seems to be a little adapted. ‘Violent’ or ...”

“... jumble concocted largely from letters she had written to her sisters and to Fanny’s brother George, suggests the need to prepare young women to make their own way, but it cannot quite reject the social conservatism that Wollstonecraft would continue to find intermittently attractive all her life: her prescriptions are tame and include (among other ...”

“... locomotive blocks its path. ‘Each outcry of the hunted hare/A fibre from the brain does tear,’ Blake said, but this hare’s death looks as if it will be instantaneous. ‘The world has never seen anything like this picture,’ Thackeray said. Commenting on the writer’s reaction to the painting, John Barrell wrote (in the LRB of 18 December 2014) that ...”

“... with the US, alert to Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to younger students and I admired them. I was ...”

“... pay dirt: according to various commentators, not just Professor St Peter and Tom Outland and Roddy Blake, but also Louie Marsellus and Lillian, the professor’s son-in-law and wife, respectively, are homosexuals. Another lurking invert is Sapphira Colbert, the paralysed old woman in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. You can tell, says Robert J. Nelson, because her ...”

“... in November. In Washington at the end of September, Macmillan saw Eisenhower, Dulles and George Humphrey, the US treasury secretary. Yet he still could not grasp that, in Humphrey’s words after the invasion, ‘You’ll not get a dime out of the US government until you’ve gotten out of Suez.’ Roger Makins, Macmillan’s private secretary, who ...”

“... care. Social care budgets, outsourced and administered through local authorities, collapsed during George Osborne’s austerity decade. In October, the County Councils Network, representing 36 mostly Tory administrations, warned of care providers abandoning contracts, chronic staff shortages and an impending £3.7 billion in additional costs as a result of ...”