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“... Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but a posse partly made up of the self-appointed scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s ...”

“... critics. Ideally, from a critical point of view, artists ought to follow Keats’s example and die young, leaving behind a tidy oeuvre about which coherent generalisations can be made. Too often, however, artists survive to an unreasonable age, passing through phase after phase, advancing and regressing with no steady rhythm, every year or so tossing a new ...”

“... book is not so much ‘death, fear, hunger’, as the effects of a unique kind of confinement on a young middle-class Englishman of his generation – namely, the experience of a prisoner-of-war camp. He originally published it in 1947 as a novel and has now reissued it as an ‘autobiographical memoir’, unchanged except for a brief explanatory preface. It ...”

“... 1926, apparently by suicide; his mother then married the family lodger, a man called Berryman; the young boy was sent to a boarding-school, a sport-fixated establishment at which he was never happy, and completed his American education at Columbia College, New York; he took up a scholarship to Cambridge (England) from 1936 to 1938, returning to America and a ...”

“... and there’s a touch of Sheila Graham in the Garden of Allah, with Fitzgerald drunk on the floor. Kenneth Anger is deep in conversation with Nathanael West at the counter of Schwab’s drugstore, Joan Didion’s desert air is wafting in under the door, and Ben Hecht is taking notes. Stein has an ear for Americana at its most bewildering, most politically ...”

“... Parthenon. It isn’t clear that the journey to Arezzo was made by many British artists. But the young Edgar Degas went there in the summer of the very year that Layard’s article appeared. Soon afterwards, Degas began his large canvas (now in the Musée d’Orsay) of Semiramis Directing the Building of Babylon. The gracious but rigid pose of the Queen and ...”

“... tries to stake out new territory; he’s aware that both Gaby Wood’s Living Dolls (2002) and Kenneth Gross’s The Dream of the Moving Statue (1992, reissued 2006) have explored this material with learning and verve, and tries hard to distinguish his approach. He insists that the dolls he has chosen to explore are not surrogates for someone or something ...”

“... aloof and misanthropic: ‘An unpleasant man,’ P.G. Wodehouse told an interviewer in the 1970s. Kenneth Clark, with whom Hastings says Maugham enjoyed a ‘firm friendship’, described him as ‘an extremely mysterious character’; Christopher Isherwood likened him to a Gladstone bag: ‘God only knows what is inside.’ (Maugham said much the same about ...”

“... or two days later the most incredible bangers passed through … then came the cyclists, mostly young people … Last came the heavy carts belonging to the peasants of the Nord department. They advanced at walking pace loaded up with the sick, children, the elderly, agricultural machinery and furniture … Several of these carts followed one another ...”

“... they leave out: he uses few long or rare words, no regular metres and almost no metaphors. The young Creeley aspired to write in Basic English: ‘he very nearly does,’ his friend Cid Corman wrote, except for the slang. Creeley kept for five decades a way of writing whose markers include parsimonious diction, strong enjambment, two to four-line stanzas ...”

“... no decisive break from home and hearth, and yet with incremental assuredness and bravery, the young Hilda got herself out (with a timely, complicated assist from Pound, her importunate suitor whom she first met at the age of fifteen). She exited the rounds of upper-middle-class suburban life, the expectations of conventional marriage and motherhood. Her ...”

“... How to be black in America was the challenge for spirited young men of colour who found their way to Harlem in the troubled years of the 1940s, when music, poetry, dance and art were giving way to drink, drugs, street crime and sex for money. Malcolm Little’s first impulse was to cut loose in the big city where he found himself soon after his 17th birthday in 1942 ...”

“... He said: “I heard you were the greatest living poet.” ’ Bunting got a kick out of the young man, Tom Pickard, and found much in the poetry that excited him. He wrote to Dorothy Pound in June 1965: ‘Well, I thought, if poetry really has the power to renew itself, I’d better write something for these younger chaps to read ... I planned a longish ...”

“... expected is the scope of the extra-vehicular ‘education’ Wardaddy seems ready to offer the young man. As the crews relax after taking a small town, Wardaddy leads Norman into a building where they find two women, Irma (Anamaria Marinca) and her young cousin Emma (Alicia von Rittberg). While Irma fries the eggs ...”

“... or on albums or in ordinary books. One was The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. It had been published first in 1950, with a second edition in 1962. The other was The New Poetry, also published in 1962. Edited by A. Alvarez, it had a crazy Jackson Pollock painting on the cover. In the Allott anthology I was intrigued by some ...”