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“... alive. A lot of rather condescending nonsense used to be written about ‘the good little Thomas Hardy’ (James’s phrase, alas) and his modest social origins, those origins somehow explaining both the qualities and the lapses of his writing. Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that some of the power of his writing flows from his rural ...”

“... to place and pin them down in a way that could not be done with real American poets – Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. She even places Lowell inside a critical trope. ‘The New Critical doctrine that every poem is a little drama built around a central paradox is ... in the very fabric of their lives ... especially Lowell, whose life is ...”

“... of Athens invites adaptation because it is already a collaboration – it was partly written by Thomas Middleton, who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play ...”

“... the House of Representatives, the precedent evoked is that of 1800, ‘when Colonel Burr and Thomas Jefferson each received the same number of votes’. The most interesting historical figure in 1876 is Tilden, whose principled refusal to cheat the process (or work it) is viewed by Schuyler with equal measures of respect and impatience. Tilden is one of ...”

“... I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about it, though, was the way it left the ...”

“... has been the focus of attention for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member ...”

“... This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should not exaggerate the amount of patronage available to evangelical scholars under Henry: Henry, after all, did not like their views, and only patronised them when their views on something else appeared to be more important to him. In her ...”

“... through his fiction just as it flowed through the city itself. There’s a strong whiff of Emlyn Williams ham in all this and one reaches for Trollope’s prissy ‘Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of ...”

“... are an aviatrix third wife, a sodden poet Warren Penfield, an ‘industrial consultant’ Thomas Crapo (alias ‘Tommy the Emperor’) and Crapo’s girl, Clara. Joe is taken on as a servant, only to elope after a few months with Clara. On the run, he gets a job in a Bennett factory. There is a strike; the strike is broken; so are some of Joe’s ...”

“... through her papers, and rush round when anything went wrong. He brought her recordings of Dylan Thomas (reading Nightwood) and James Joyce – she had never seen a tape-recorder before. After his meetings with her he wrote a diary – published as Life is Painful, Nasty and Short (1990) – in which he would report the conversations they had just had. When ...”

“... his home in Worcester. There, Fisher saw for the first time the work of the later William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and others. ‘I’d never seen poetry used as these people were, in their various ways, using it,’ Fisher remembered, ‘nor had I seen it treated as so vital ...”

“... It’s someone’s piss, not even mine, And now instead of riding pillion My head is under Hugo Williams. This is funny, but Porter’s real ‘bad dreams’ were worse. When he relaxed the cleverness and the deflection of pain through irony, they kept coming back. ‘I cried for sheer simplicity/as though I took an everlasting heart/from my long-buried ...”

“... Watch over the last ten years. Ntaganda’s trial, scheduled for next year, will follow that of Thomas Lubanga, the UPC’s president, who was convicted in 2012. There seems to be no question about the justice of the proceedings. At the same time, however, the UN Security Council has been pursuing a strategy of armed intervention in eastern Congo, using ...”

“... by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But the taxonomy is bizarre, as Bernard Williams once complained, since it contrasts a method or approach to philosophy with a geographical region, ‘rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese’. Even the term ‘analytic philosophy’ is misleading. When it came into ...”

“... would later call, applying the term to a very different kind of music, ‘entartete Kunst’. Thomas Mann was to satirise this attitude in Buddenbrooks, where Edmund Pfühl, the local organist, refuses to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted ...”