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“... around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet of weirdness, New England weirdness, Robert Lowell, knew also about cars: ‘A savage servility slides by on grease.’ There are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be ...”

“... and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time. New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is ...”

“... heart of the Museum. His favourite seat is said to have been number L13.This last detail is not in Robert Henderson’s book, which leads me to wonder whether it’s wrong. Henderson, a former Russian curator at the British Library, knows everything there is to know about Lenin’s love affair with the BM, and tells it all. This is a level of detailed ...”

“... Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s sometime collaborator Christopher Middleton edited another in the much missed Cape Editions in 1968. Yet these did not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well attuned to Sylvia ...”

“... been pointed out that Greville seems to have been remembering a passage in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander.’ I would agree that the story is a bit unpleasant, because it is aggressively holy: many a trooper would resent having gratitude and admiration dragged out of him at such a time. The OK thing would be to drink some of the cup himself and pass it ...”

“... a deadly activity. It literally killed, or was believed to, which sometimes had the same result. Robert Elliott’s classic study of The Power of Satire tells us that poems were used as weapons of war in pre-Islamic Arabia, and it is not only there, or in the curses of primitive tribesmen remote from our literary tradition, that this ‘power’ showed ...”

“... against Nixon, the strategy might have worked had it not been for the slip of a White House aide, Alexander Butterfield, who revealed to investigators the existence of a secret taping system in Nixon’s offices. Dean’s televised testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee – which implicated Nixon in the cover-up – was a sensation. It was now Dean’s ...”

“... write. Some authors apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I heard Alexander McCall Smith, a writer of feel-good detective novels, tell an interviewer how his work comes to him through his ‘unconscious’: plots, characters, everything bubbles up from the murky depths and tells him its story. He just types it out. Now this I ...”

“... than the disease which may be more fatal, but more common. The words of another Scottish MOH, Alexander MacGregor of Glasgow, illustrate why this perception was wrong for measles: ‘In 1907-08 it gave notice of its presence by appearing on the outskirts of the city in the spring, hovering there till the autumn and then descending on the city like an ...”

“... quite a lot of nonsense about in expatriate Paris, but the prize charlatan has to be the Scotsman Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi mesmerised most of those around him. He was clever but pretentious: the pin-ball machine ‘became for me a ritual act, symbolising a cosmic event’. He was the driving force behind the English-language review Merlin, which published a ...”

“... to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised solely by the phrase: ‘created a sensation ...”

“... the sake of plain speaking, the account Suetonius gives of Tiberius’s goatish habits on Capri; Robert Graves’s translation is sufficiently graphic for most tastes. The Middle Ages and Renaissance pass with incomprehensible anecdotes about lusty millers, many pages of Rabelais, Aretino’s account of a gang-bang. There is the odd snippet of useful ...”

“... of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary and delivered ...”

“... a slave-driver’s lash. Scots, in that sense, were the non-commissioned officers of empire; even Robert Burns, a sentimental abolitionist, planned to take a job in Jamaica as an overseer of slaves. The same myth suggested that Gaelic emigrants raised in a clan system had a special rapport with traditional societies. In fact, Highlanders behaved with ...”