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“... than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes ...”

“... World, represented ‘the final struggle of the two races – the decisive death grapple of the savage and the civilised man ... with all its immense results’. What Prescott, Leutze and the critics all had in mind was a struggle nearer home. In the 1840s the final surge of European settlers into California was taking place, and across the continent wars ...”

“... and of reconstructions-from-afar is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert Louis Stevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the nature of the voyage for the Scots on ...”

“... possible conclusion to a life that had been based on communication: but Pocock handles the savage twist at the end of the tale with a fine mixture of candour and sensitivity. Those are the qualities which Carl Bernstein clearly seeks to bring to bear when telling the story of another family tragedy – this time, the wanton wrecking of the lives of ...”

“... viewed themselves as commanders-in-chief. He cites the examples of Joseph Wedgwood and Robert Owen, both faced with reducing half-savage flocks to order, both using the military metaphors beloved by men of peace (not least hymn-writers). Owen, who was criticised for marching his men from job to job in military ...”

“... likes to think of itself as a far-flung version of 15th-century Florence, a cultural oasis in a savage wilderness, but, in truth, it has never been a significant centre for the arts in America, not in 1955, not now. Perhaps this is because it is such a forgiving place, or was once, and such a remarkably pleasant place to be. Some of the presiding literary ...”

“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”

“... a new magazine targeted readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ...”

“... differently.’Analogy – Nero for George I, say, or the Roman imperial enforcer Sejanus for Sir Robert Walpole – was one way of speaking in order to be understood differently. Others were allusion, ellipsis, circumlocution, irony (including mock forms such as mock epideixis, elaborately praising something unpraiseworthy so as to undermine it) and ...”

“... Free Officers were also worsted – first by Qassim and the Communists, then in the course of the savage in-fighting which followed for most of the Sixties and from which Saddam Hussein and the Ba’th Party emerged as victors. One hard lesson learned by Saddam from the searing experiences of these years was never to give a rival a break. When the first ...”

“... been’ warns us of the horrifying slaughter to come, in which Henry’s friends Jimmy Conway (Robert de Niro), who has masterminded the robbery, and his mate Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), whack all their associates in the crime except Henry (who’s crucial to a drug operation they profit by). Hill’s narration, during a sequence in which the camera ...”

“... cosmic scale; of Tsvetaeva’s it was poetry. Yet it is true that even as one reads of the truly savage treatment accorded her by the Russian émigré community in Paris, one helplessly sympathises with them. If by some miracle one could undo the tragedy of Tsvetaeva’s suicide in 1941 and bring her back to earth to finish her allotted time, one might ...”

“... ancient culture’ (almost echoing the phrases he elsewhere applied to Trinity) while ‘relics of savage ignorance survive at their doors.’ Abercromby Square is not as secluded as Trinity Great Court, but it seems a little hard on Liverpool; it is difficult to believe that for Frazer there was no unconscious reference to his present situation. A life like ...”

“... choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly because of the ...”

“... it was all about: ‘I do not know of any new poet,’ AE wrote in a review, ‘who has such a savage splendour of epithet or who can marry the wild word so fittingly to the wild thought.’ Not everyone would take that as praise, perhaps: but evidently Campbell did. At least he went on, to the end of his life, writing savagely and thinking wildly. The ...”