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“... and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to be a ...”

“... possible to be well-briefed about Karl before meeting him for the first time. This was thanks to Clive James’s introduction to his collection Visions before Midnight. James said that Karl, who’d commissioned him to write about TV for the Listener, was brilliant, forceful and very very funny: ‘When he was in the ...”

“... and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages ...”

“... everyday life for everybody else. This can come as a shock to even the best-informed citizens. James Carville, the Svengali behind Clinton’s election win in 1992, was so amazed by the power of freely moving capital, viewed at close range, he said that if reincarnation were real, he would like to be born again as the international bond markets. But the ...”

“... that I’m amazed I was able to achieve,’ Gunn said.) ‘Considering the Snail’ – inspired, Clive Wilmer tells us, by Paul Klee’s painting from 1924 – begins: The snail pushes through a green night, for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes, where rain has darkened the earth’s dark. He moves in a wood of ...”

“... movement was very noticeable; also a theme in the first movement, a fine march.’ In the novel, Clive Durham plays this 5/4 movement – in effect a metrically odd waltz – on the pianola to Maurice at one of their early encounters. Much later, hearing the work in concert, Maurice is told by Risley that Tchaikovsky fell in love with his own nephew ‘and ...”

“... like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and Boston’s own) Henry James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable public ...”