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“... till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I still haven’t seen, though years ago when I was reading everything I could get hold of on America and McCarthyism I came across Miller’s novel Focus, in ...”

“... and best investigative reporters (all two of them). Take a long and detailed article by Judith Miller, buried on page 12 of the New York Times: only in the 30th paragraph of 34 do we learn that prewar American Intelligence on Iraqi weapons sites was often ‘stunningly wrong’. In the words of a senior US officer: The teams would be given a packet, with ...”

“... upstate New York doctor, George Sumner Huntington, who specified its symptoms in 1872; Parkinson (James) got his tremor in 1817 and soon thereafter the great anatomist Charles Bell, whom Darwin admired, could be even more precise about ‘his’ disorder – Bell’s palsy – of the seventh cranial nerve; Alzheimer’s disease after Alois of early ...”

“... gruelling routines had to be rolled around the palate and the tongue many a time before Clive James suddenly exclaimed: “A Shropshire Cunt by A.E. Sockprong”.’ I have a Y chromosome, so I can just about see that this is funny. But I can’t imagine that it was enough, as Hitchens suggests, ‘to make the long interludes of puerility ...”

“... in the avant-garde Paris literary journal Volontés, which also published Raymond Queneau, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda.Return to My Native Land is often situated in the French literary tradition, and discussed in relation to Césaire’s major stylistic influences – Lautréamont, Claudel, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. But the poem is also part of a ...”

“... the play dealing with Nick Hytner’s comments, worrying that some of them are too literal: e.g. sixth formers wouldn’t do PE, even in the 1980s, when the play is set, thus ruling out the gymnasium scene I quite wanted. Nick backs up his judgment by asking the younger people at the National what went on at their schools. Which is fine, though I ...”

“... of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of ...”

“... in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks being, in a sense, the ultimate reality, it struck a ...”

“... a few years at Merrill Lynch, a stint in Moscow, an unpublishable PhD on oil and gas in the ex-Soviet Union. But he offered to broker connections between Trump and senior Russian officials. He also dangled the prospect of a direct meeting with Putin. This was dressed up as a means of achieving a ‘game-changing effect … in bringing the end of the new ...”

“... he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown something of a gloom’ over the island (‘Such a tiresome old Aunty’). Before the month ...”

“... like any other concert and where the same rules apply.21 January, Yorkshire. A creature of habit, en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as ...”

“... High Modernism. This audience has been characterised in various ways – young, Penguin-reading, ex-services, ‘provincial’ – but was united by a delight in seeing ordinary human appetites and fallibilities treated sympathetically in fiction. The characteristic tone of the writing was, in a phrase Amis the reviewer used in speaking of one of the ...”

“... behind the voices in recent poetry: Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, Ginsberg, Plath, Hughes, et al. Even in Larkin there exists a strong, identifiable persona, no matter how recessive the tone.’ In Gunn, this was deliberate. In an interview he said: People do have difficulty with my poetry, difficulties in locating the central voice or central ...”

“... projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”