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“... a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a split, presumably in the hope of establishing that there ...”

“... author with a useful facility for writing more than the market would bear from any one name. In ‘straight’ fiction one can cite Anthony Burgess as someone who has borrowed this downmarket technique. In the famously productive year of his death sentence – having been misinformed that he had a terminal illness, and wishing to provide for his family ...”

“... Eurydice, and when Lot’s wife looked back she was turned to salt. Perhaps their looks were too straight. White’s hesitations allow him to celebrate what may have been madness, and to question the celebration at the same time. Forgetting Elena, White’s first novel, which is all about disguise and decorum, a picture of the gay world of Fire Island as if ...”

“... even slightly implausible, persistence, while acknowledging that their makers have left the straight way: one digs with his pen, the other retires to eat dirt. Or take another un-adopted poem, one or two along in Short Haul Engine, ‘Boyfriend’s Car’. Every word dangerous, every word a specification: Black Nova. Jacked up. Fast. Rhetorical ...”

“... Roman army and retook Pontus one final time. Open conflict among Roman commanders again played straight into his hands, but in Rome, Pompey’s supporters were always on the lookout for new ways to augment their patron’s glory. They now seized the opportunity to have the command against Mithridates transferred to Pompey, who might thereby continue a long ...”

“... of context’, where the words of a poem represent possibilities of meaning rather than the straight delivery of a preconceived thought. Even so, her writing, attentive to every twist and turn of the words on the page, has a riskiness about it that we don’t associate with the New Criticism. Unless of course we count William Empson as belonging to the ...”

“... walked the talk: he carried momentum, all the momentum of a small country. Before America set him straight, he considered ‘it was better to have the support of a small nation than everything inherent in the idiocy of a huge nation.’ (America got wind of this attitude, got very sniffy and never quite forgave him.) He was a pendulum, and there was no ...”

“... had created the Transport and General Workers Union; and Herbert Morrison, the shop assistant straight out of Mr Polly, had risen to influence through local government in London, including the leadership of the London County Council. The later decline in the authority of trade unionists in Parliament was to have serious consequences, but the virtual ...”

“... that’s his plot. Then there’s Don Gately, a former housebreaker and narcotics addict who goes straight before the book even opens and merely attempts to stay that way throughout the course of the novel – that’s his plot. And then there is Rémy Marathe, the leader of a group of Québecois secessionist, wheelchair-bound terrorists, who spends the first ...”

“... class that had given way to an Irish American bootlegging dynasty and affiliated ethnic pols like Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. Romney lived in a mansion in Belmont, a town between Cambridge and Walden Pond with nothing but mansions; in the era of NWA I recall another boy being teased for being ‘straight outta ...”

“... reimagined for Phantom Ride involve images or technologies of violence. The camera swerves around Michael Sandle’s A 20th-Century Memorial: an elaborately queasy rendering in bronze and brass of a skeletal Mickey Mouse equipped with machine gun and tripod. There’s another machine gun among a cluster of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sculptures. Patrick ...”

“... Tiepolo,’ Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write, ‘is not a difficult painter. He is accessible and easy to like.’ Well, up to a point. For example, while I did not find the Tiepolos in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 18th-century Venetian art ‘difficult’ in any obvious way, I did not find them ‘easy to like’ either ...”

“... In a Foreword to this very substantial book Michael Ffinch says that G.K. Chesterton ‘was above all things a great champion of Liberty’. He goes on: ‘This being so, it has often come as a surprise that in religion Chesterton should have moved away from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood towards Catholicism ...”

“... but ‘the word gay wouldn’t have meant anything to them.’ ‘That means they moved in the straight world,’ the interviewer suggests, and Baldwin simply says: ‘They moved in the world.’ Closed categories were his enemies from first to last, and yet he seems himself to have been dazzled and bewildered by the categories of fame and success. They ...”

“... but is that to count in their favour?’ But an alarming number of others seem to have stepped straight out of the condescending dreams of D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry, all immemorial wisdom and ethnic patience. They say things like ‘The soul of Mexico is very old,’ or ‘The road has its own reasons and no two travellers will have the same ...”