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“... departure to America, from whose prosperous shores nostalgic tourists would return to visit ‘the gray ruin and the mouldering stone’ of England. Her essay ‘On the Pleasure to be extracted front Objects of Terror’ analysed the Gothic mode as just that. It was a kind of reductio for literary purposes of Burke’s notion of the sublime as the ...”

“... and The Skull Beneath the Skin, in which the investigator’s role is filled by Cordelia Gray, the young proprietor of a London detective agency, and heroine of an earlier adventure, recounted in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1971). Innocent Blood, like Barbara Vine’s A Dark-Adapted Eye, is centred on a bygone killing and its perpetrator (a woman ...”

“... that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of ...”

“... poet. Barnes, Hardy decided, ‘really belonged to the literary school of such poets as Tennyson, Gray and Collins, rather than to that of the old unpremeditated singers in dialect’. Both Hardy and Hopkins come near to acknowledging that the dialect, and the markings of it in the text, belong to the packaging and promotion of the product, not to the product ...”

“... hasn’t yet looked into the extent of this practice.As children of the spied-on, my brother John and I knew that the telephones in both our parents’ houses were tapped (they divorced when we were young). My dad had been a surveillance target since the formation of SDS, and probably before. It was obvious, sometimes, talking to a schoolfriend on the ...”

“... Barney, who boasted that she was the only American not driving an ambulance). The designer Eileen Gray and her ‘companion’, the weaver and cellist Evelyn Wyld, were part of a fleet of drivers assembled by Lily de Gramont. Dolly Wilde joined them. Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, started the ‘heiress corps’ with her partner, Anne Murray Dike. For ...”

“... of many things, but in most places, at most times, and for most people, it was and is as Thomas Gray described it in 1750: ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’. So far so good. But if poverty is promoted from a platitude to a problem, things become much more difficult. For the problems of poverty are simple yet complex: what is poverty? And what is ...”

“... As John Berryman​ tells it, in a Paris Review interview conducted in 1970, he was walking to a bar in Minneapolis one evening in the mid-1950s with his second wife, Anne, the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable ...”

“... who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs Stevenson’s faded existence is not lost on him, and he does what he can for her ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... feral figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ...”

“... to New Times, Leavis to Lyotard, Aldermaston to ethnicity. He is also a Marxian version of Dorian Gray, a preternaturally youthful character whose personal style evokes a range of faded American epithets: hip, neat, cool, right-on. There are two ways to recount his story, one less charitable than the other. The more jaundiced narrative is one of a relentless ...”

“... reported his findings to the president and his officials, including the White House counsel, John Dean. As 1972 was an election year, the strategy of the White House focused on containment. In the short term, at least, the president’s men were successful. The break-in did not become a big story. On 19 June Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, called ...”

“... those scores of German Literatur-wissenschaftler confronting the present cultural scene: Alasdair Gray juggling with realism and fantasy, Gait’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Carlyle’s semiotics, the perfectibilities of the Enlightenment and the grand maps of sociology. Or Kelman’s characters attempting to tap into a universal consciousness from the ...”

“... his new novel, is an attempt to bring to life the thesis of the novelist in Mao II, Bill Gray: The novel used to feed our search for meaning . . . It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us towards something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which ...”