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“... strangely devoid of any personal note, while Dorothy’s could only have been written by her. Alan Hill, who is editing the new complete edition of William’s and Dorothy’s letters, has made a selection of her letters that reads like a narrative, and follows her from the dependent state as orphan with the Cooksons at Penrith to the premature onset of senile ...”

“... should not calumniate the unnamed, or incite parlour-game guesswork about poetry. (Is it Geoffrey Hill? Fifteen sonnets doesn’t fit, though there would be something boldly winsome about offering Hill as your example of the poet insufficiently dedicated to his art.) Even more important, there is the assertive naivety which ...”

“... adapted traditional remedies: in China, public sweat baths, opium and herbal extracts; in India, hill tribes moulded figures out of flour and water, and waved them over the sick. In New Jersey William Carlos Williams, working as a family physician, wrote: ‘We doctors were making up to sixty calls a day. Several of us were knocked out, one of the younger of ...”

“... they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul Heinrich Mann. She had definite artistic talents, played the piano quite nicely and sang. My husband learned the entire ...”

“... the Fabians (a decision they were later to regret) only after hot, breathless bicycled pursuit up hill and down dale. So, Britain argues, the reason they readily accepted Wells’s later merciless and influential lampoon of themselves in The New Machiavelli, as people devoid of taste and in love with ugliness, was not because they were philistines but because ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was attended by his sleepover pal and minder, Michael Jackson. We have heard it stated, quite accurately, that construction work on the Olympic Park has been carried out with few casualties. But cycle deaths are mounting, from the early casualties of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow ...”

“... still quiet – a far cry from its days as a fruit and flower nexus. I read in the Observer that Michael Caine’s father had worked in one of the London markets. Now the Market – like Caine – is gentrified, no stalls, shops or clientele operating much before 11 a.m. The figures, when we spread them out on our desk, are still below profitability, but ...”

“... voyeurism than Surrealism. The titles emphasise the link to cinema: The Haunted Bathroom, Campden Hill shows a heavily made-up woman baring her breasts, while The Policeman’s Daughter, Hampstead shows a young woman sitting naked in an upright wooden chair, half turned towards us. A bright light illuminates her body, throwing dark shadows across the ...”

“... slept late that morning. ‘Sally over there,’ one of them said, ‘was on the phone with McGraw-Hill.’ One of my tasks before I quit to go into magazines was to rewrite Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet for editions that presented Shakespeare’s text opposite my easy-to-read prose ‘translations’. The books apparently sold well, but I wasn’t entitled to ...”

“... household gadgets to practising law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony ...”

“... involvement in a porno racket, and sometimes with a more serious resonance as in Geoffrey Hill’s poems on Offa. Mr Leyser matches Hill in the intensity of his meditation on the meaning of the past, a past whose remoteness Dr McKitterick’s conventional approach confirms. The paradoxical nature of Early Medieval ...”

“... the historian Lecky pronounced in 1892. And not long afterwards, Isaac Foot, the father of Michael and a firm Cromwellian, used to ‘judge a man by one thing: “Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?”’ Worden has no time for Postmodernism, the view that ‘the past exists only in the present’s head, and that ...”

“... In​ the 1950s, Western scholars and Chinese émigrés were writing extensively on the classical tradition in China, but historians in the People’s Republic were constrained by a Marxist framework that sorted the major thinkers of the past into ‘materialists’ (good) and ‘idealists’ (bad). This impasse lasted until Mao’s death in 1976, but classical scholarship continued to be neglected into the 1980s, as a flood of translations entered China and with them a vast body of Western thought ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”