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“... Speaking​ of his remarkable version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, John Ashbery said: ‘I myself try to be very literal, and I frequently use cognates even when they might sound a little strange in English.’ ‘Are there times when that doesn’t work?’ his interviewer, Claude Peck, asked. Ashbery replied without hesitation: ‘Oh sure, on every page, many times ...”

“... gallant men, and I thought them fools.’ What, I wonder, did these ‘fools’ think of John Milton as he watched and judged and yet abstained from their pleasures? Towards the end of his Latin poem on the death of his university friend Carlo Diodati, Milton expresses the fear that he might sound ‘turgidulus’. He then launches into a description ...”

“... with the Scotch case is also fuelled by proselytising zeal. She has used her transcript materials freely: intertwining her own experiences with her woman lover, Ollie; making dialogues out of depositions; popping character sketches into the mouths of judges, and mingling speculation and quotation in a way which makes it difficult to separate fact from special ...”

“... or fire. I do remember her giving me fast clouts about the ears. This ability to move our arms freely in all directions we share with the apes in memory of our mutual days swinging in the trees. It is called brachiation, and is one of the many large and small features which we have in common with apes. My parents assured me that my grandmother was a ...”

“... was later Countess of Wemyss, was often supposed to be Balfour’s mistress. Kenneth Young wrote freely of the affaire between them, and Egremont confirms that they were pledged to each other and had some kind of sexual liaison, fading in the course of time into the friendship of two old people. But as he shows, the relationship was not straightforward. What ...”

“... for Britain’s diplomats. In a sense they were: the other countries needed no reminding that John Major had a general election in front of him and a nationalist Mrs Thatcher close behind. But if in the short run the opt-out clauses largely silenced the Thatcherite opposition, in longer perspective they were a triumph for humbug. No one had ever ...”

“... literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight Macdonald were among the many writers active on the anti-Stalinist left who were in conflict with the League. Partisan Review posed a series of questions challenging ...”

“... to do good and bad,’ and William Lambert, vicar from 1574 to 1592, used holy water in baptism freely, and preached rarely. Much of the work of conversion seems to have been done by a schoolmaster, John Leeche, who conducted house hold worship with larger audiences than the vicar. After courting martyrdom for six ...”

“... bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of ...”

“... of Cliveden, made available to Ward at weekends by Lord Astor, who with his friends, including John Profumo, the Minister for War, would chase a minutely towelled Keeler and others around the swimming pool. But all this, says Keeler, was a front for Ward’s real activity, which was spying for Russia on the British establishment during the months before ...”

“... grand old capitalised words go, they suspect, so do grand, stirring visions of the human future. John Dewey shared Strachey’s and Virginia Woolf’s conviction that Sin had been a really terrible idea. He would certainly have agreed with Foucault that truth will always be intertwined with power, and that subjectivity is a social construction. Yet he was as ...”

“... of any literary stature were only too aware of the tradition of publishing correspondence. John Evelyn, for example, arranged his manuscript letter books to resemble a collection on the classical model. The privacy of the letter was a vexed issue. Once cast into the mailbag it was lost to the sender but might never arrive: ‘I am very uneasy about the ...”

“... who is behind all the bribes’ – which they alleged to be worth many millions of dollars. John Cripton, a Canadian impresario who had booked the Maryinsky/Kirov on foreign tours for ten years, said that Vinogradov used to demand additional payments on every contract. Vinogradov denies everything, and – now out on bail – has continued to work at ...”

“... we are as the double almond concealed in one shell,’ he broods in ‘Colloquy with John Keats’, going on to predict his own equally untimely demise in harsh demotic terms – ‘Look! My number is up!’ After his cremation at Rookwood Cemetery Ethel opened his trunk and set about disposing of his pitiably meagre possessions; in the process ...”

“... to divine that something odd is going on behind the scenes of Adam Sisman’s new biography of John le Carré. In the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are ...”