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“... could.’ This was the sketchy outline I carried with me to New York on a trip, with the producer Paul Quinn, to research a radio programme about the Beat heritage. I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 ...”

“... on a trip to America in 1920, in the form of Robert McAlmon, a writer and friend of William Carlos Williams. McAlmon was also gay, and wanted to escape to Paris. Bryher suggested that they get married. ‘I put my problem before him … if we married, my family would leave me alone. I would give him part of my allowance, he would join me for occasional visits ...”

“... Keywords’, Jan Zita Grover runs through a lexicon of Aids vocabulary after the manner of Raymond Williams, angrily expounding the ways in which PLWA (people living with Aids) are linguistically punished by the rest of the community. Her approach is determinedly polemical, so that despite what must be an overwhelming sympathy with many aspects of her ...”

“... and almost never – a further compliment – to the contemporary writers he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and ...”

“... earlier on the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued in the Counter-Reformation pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual ...”

“... piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a stir on the letters page by identifying him – correctly – as a former communist. He rarely lets a response to a piece he has written go ...”

“... giving me, ready plotted, another play in An Englishman Abroad.1 December. A card from a friend, Paul Fincham, drawing my attention to a passage in Kilvert’s Diary (which I thought I’d read).New Year’s Day 1882. I went to London by the midday mail. Reached 23 Gloucester Crescent at 3 o’clock. Katie ran down to open the door – prettier than ...”

“... intellectuals and scholars (Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, E. Franklin Frazier, Eric Williams) who together would subject the global racial order to excoriating analysis.Bunche spent a dozen years at Howard, finding his wife, Ruth, among his students; the school also proved a springboard for an astonishingly forward-looking research agenda. At a ...”

“... among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing vogue ...”

“... us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful as the hymns. The audience is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson ...”

“... films and other media. When Dreyer made his extraordinary film in 1928, and Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel composed the oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher ten years later, both were working in the light of modern wars and prejudice. And their works are prophetic: the civil war in 15th-century France presages the treacheries both of the Occupation in ...”

“... or perhaps it’s the other way round. Elsewhere Auden quotes from one of his touchstones, Charles Williams, who writes of overwhelming yet undefinable moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd blend of the ...”

“... subject matter and literary strategy, following the frankly homoerotic early stories of Tennessee Williams.’ Hmm – if you’re following in the footsteps of an earlier writer can you be said to be opening doors? And if Purdy was bold to follow in his wake, how is Williams’s own courage to be assessed?...”

“... enemy nowadays egg-collectors.4 December. To the funeral at St Dunstan’s, Canterbury of John Williams, whom I have known since we were at Oxford and whose character is summed up in an incident during his National Service. Entered for officer selection, he found himself pitted against another candidate on an obstacle course. Arriving at a hanging rope at ...”

“... It was chaired by Victor Rothschild and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law ...”