By chaunce, in Livias modest company; / When, after the god-saving ceremony, / For want of talke-stuffe, fals to foinery; / Out goes his rapier, and to Livia / He shewes the ward by puncta reversa

For, in theſe ſtrifes, and on ſuch perſons, were as wretched to affect a victorie, as it is vnhappy to be committed with them.

I went with some of my relations to Court, to shew them his Maᵗⁱᵉˢ cabinet and closset of rarities; […] Here I saw […] amongst the clocks, one that shew'd the rising and setting of the Sun in yᵉ Zodiaq, the Sunn represented by a face and raies of gold, upon an azure skie, observing yᵉ diurnal and annual motion, rising and setting behind a landscape of hills, the work of our famous Fromantel; and severall other rarities.

To both Beckett and Orwell, a Poundlike injunction to make the novel new coupled with a faith in the (abstract) revolutionary power of autonomous art would have sounded hollow and naive, perhaps dangerously so.