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“... idiosyncratic and contradictory way, he chose to do both. His reputation has suffered as a result. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry was first published in 1972, and written in California, where Davie had taken up a professorship at Stanford. With the Grain reprints the Hardy book in its entirety, along with a number of essays, directly or obliquely ...”

“... then and later, to develop any consistent style for Scots prose guaranteed its demise. Both Thomas Crawford, writing on 18th-century Scots verse, and Hamish Henderson, on the ballads, stress the interplay between Scots and English. While the poetry Crawford deals with does not, perhaps, travel well outside of Scotland, his sympathetic and honest account ...”

“... Rights, began as far back as the Greeks. Such historians generally devote considerable space to Thomas Hobbes, who had much to say about ‘natural rights’, and carefully follow the labyrinthine debates among Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke and Wolff on the same and related subjects, before even reaching the late 18th century. Hunt has little to say on any of ...”

“... history, which extended citizenship and basic legal rights to blacks, overturning the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 which had insisted that only white persons could be citizens of the United States. Johnson vetoed both bills. This was the start of an increasingly acrimonious conflict with Congress, in which, Wineapple writes, Johnson ...”

“... Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called it ‘extraordinary’; the New York Times critic A.O. Scott said it was ‘essential, like water or air’; in a widely circulated blurb, Toni Morrison likened Coates to Baldwin and declared the book ‘required reading’; even Jay-Z tweeted to his millions of followers: ‘Please. read.’ For some time ...”

“... her first in any language.The most eloquent invocation of the seedy set-up was made by the poet Thomas Hood, who used Crachami’s exhibition to illustrate the price of fame, or of visibility, even in a person who was hardly visible to begin with. (Hood may have had in mind a sketch by John Augustus Atkinson which shows a man standing in the doorway of a ...”

“... in post-war fiction? Alas, it ‘resists demystification’ in ‘a novel of 1940’ by Leslie Thomas, and survives another novel which shows how ‘by debunking the Myth component by component ... you end up with the same pattern.’ At the end the Myth beats Angus Calder on points. He doesn’t know, or at least is not able to convey or define, the ...”

“... a small fortune in the art of ‘lending existence to nothing’, as Edmund Burke defined poetry. Thomas Hardy gave her the blurb of a lifetime when he said that the two greatest things about the United States were the skyscrapers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Her poems are still in print, and her famous lines still recognisable: ‘Euclid alone has looked on ...”

“... marches, music and a roll-call of the various craftsmen involved, written in bad verse by the poet Thomas Middleton. The reservoir was soon enlarged, and others built nearby. These served three purposes: by providing a large area of still water they allowed many impurities to settle to the bottom; they helped smooth out fluctuation in supply and demand; and ...”

“... and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the barrenness of American culture. Many of the angelheaded hipsters whom I met busied themselves in learning Old Church Slavonic or translating ...”

“... the rights of the accused, or the dictates of justice. Bullying opportunists like J. Parnell Thomas, later jailed, and Joseph McCarthy, together with such men as John E. Rankin and Richard M. Nixon, posed as crusaders, hounding writers, actors, directors, and ordinary citizens whose political opinions were their only crime. The ensuing black list ...”

“... Bacon’s the tobacconist, and on Bacon’s wall, if it stands yet, there’s an engraved poem by Thomas Calverley of which I can still quote a stave or two when maundering over the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in ...”

“... and the ‘autographic sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences (1996) attest to ...”

“... Great unknowns, pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form ...”

“... been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant ...”