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“... with a large question of the Will coming in, sometimes alarmingly, and particularly interesting to Henry James. In The Bostonians he put this exchange between Olive Chancellor, the intense young spinster, and Verena Tarrant, the easy-going, delightfully Mozartian creature who can be so fervently eloquent at feminist meetings, and who will eventually be carried ...”

“... reflections of America’s legal and religious culture. Hilton Als’s recent essays, The Women, Henry Louis Gates’s Colored People, the reportage of Keith Richburg in Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa square up to the way in which the black individual is the perceived representative of his race, and of ‘being black’; the writers fight ...”

“... of proper Scotland than could ever be accomplished by laws, statesmen or associations,’ wrote Henry Cockburn. After Scott’s death, the most significant literary figure in Edinburgh was not a Scotsman, but the reclusive Thomas de Quincey. Mr Royle treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great magazines – as a friend of ‘Christopher ...”

“... to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each story in his second collection, Pastoralia (2000), was first published in the New Yorker. Saunders’s employment history is worth sketching out because his vision of America and the American workplace could easily be mistaken for something ...”

“... education, did boys enter a more markedly masculine sphere – an experience finely dramatised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The growing boy is removed from the inadequate female guidance of mother, sisters and nursery-maid, and socialised in the exclusively masculine institution of a public school. Girls, by contrast, remained where they had always been, in ...”

“... when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke … was ...”

“... read quite like that. On the day after Thorpe’s death on 4 December 2014, the BBC journalist Tom Mangold presented a half-hour radio documentary about the other side of Thorpe’s life, his affair with a stable groom called Norman Scott in the early 1960s, when homosexuality was still illegal, which eventually led Thorpe to the dock of the Old ...”

“... at the time. The notion of eavesdropping keeps coming up in Powell’s work until with Peeping Tom it virtually ended his career. Other oddities in AMOLAD are the naked goatherd playing the flute, an unlikely sight on the Norfolk sands, I would have thought, even in 1945, and a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who ...”

“... have a restored print of The Big Sleep, half an hour longer than the original; and, most recently, Tom Hiney’s Raymond Chandler, billed as the first ‘authorised’ biography in twenty years. Chandler would be amused by his power to authorise a biography from beyond the grave, but probably not so amused by the promise of ‘new material’ about the private ...”

“... sonata to the pianist Richard Buhlig who, impressed by its maturity, sent it on to the composer Henry Cowell, then a major figure in the American avant-garde and an outspoken advocate of non-Western musical traditions. He liked the piece enough to include it in a concert programme and encouraged Cage to visit him in New York. Cowell hired Cage as his ...”

“... and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust. 2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a handsome, though rather explosive-looking young workman who is emptying sand onto the pavement ...”

“... for all the question of why Gillray should have poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a smack at Pamela – was largely confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of ...”

“... dependency like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and Boston’s own) Henry James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable ...”

“... observers (and perhaps other chimps) could be forgiven for thinking it was a reference to Thomas Henry Huxley, the best-known ‘man of science’ in Victorian England, a comparative anatomist who also became the leading, and most aggressive, public spokesman for evolutionary ideas, to the point where he was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. After all, the ...”

“... turn out to exemplify general tendencies. For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of truth but not too much overt ...”