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“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a stir on the letters page by identifying him – correctly – as a former communist. He rarely lets a response to a piece he has written go ...”

“... this assumption has been frustrated. Writing in 2004, five years into devolution, the historian Richard Finlay noted that ‘for all the talk of Scotland being more radical than England and of the nation being predisposed towards left-of-centre redistributive policies, these characteristics have not really manifested themselves in any meaningful ...”

“... intellectuals and scholars (Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, E. Franklin Frazier, Eric Williams) who together would subject the global racial order to excoriating analysis.Bunche spent a dozen years at Howard, finding his wife, Ruth, among his students; the school also proved a springboard for an astonishingly forward-looking research agenda. At a ...”

“... beginning that he would not be able to write poetry, Jarrell by August 1944 was writing to Oscar Williams: ‘If anybody can write a good poem about anything, he ought to do it about a war he’s in.’ Two months later, in Tucson, Arizona, he wrote to a friend: I’ve been wonderfully lucky for the past six months – my job and Tucson are swell, Mackie ...”

“... genealogical misfit in the multiple-graft family tree, covered in creeper; which leads from Pound, Williams and Marianne Moore through a flurry of cousins and affines to the poets of Iain Sinclair’s anthology. ‘If Rakosi were more predictable, clubbable and given to the right patter,’ August Kleinzahler wrote in 1984, ‘a collected poems would have been ...”

“... this position, uncompromising commitment to a principle becomes a good in itself, or, as Bernard Williams explored in his last book, a higher authority is accorded to truthfulness (sincerity, assertion) than to truth (precision, accuracy). Ardent conviction proves more persuasive than accurate witnessing; intensity trumps scepticism and hesitation. Joan ...”

“... sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no ...”

“... would’ve, or did you?’ they asked. ‘I did,’ said Ingram, quite calmly. A psychologist, Richard Peterson, was brought in to help interrogate Ingram: his role was vital because he gave Ingram an explanation of what was happening to him. When Ingram asked why he had no memory of what he’d done, Peterson told him that it was ‘not uncommon for ...”

“... such a thing as a pure Americanness in poetry. Earlier ‘Redskin’ poets such as William Carlos Williams sought to achieve it, probably, in contradistinction from the European corruptions of men like Eliot. But I find it much more strongly represented in such a post-Eliot poet as John Ashbery, who seems to me a true poet of distraction. The back cover of ...”

“... Israeli domination. One sure thing to fall back on is what the American historian William Appleman Williams has called ‘empire as a way of life’: the notion that since nearly everything in the world has a bearing on America, it had better be under American control. A precise insight into what sort of strategy might follow from such a premise is to be found ...”

“... with the tank. Among them we find not only Fuller, the Crowleyite and Mosleyite, but also Clough Williams-Ellis, one of the group at Bermicourt, now best known for the village of Portmeirion, which he designed and assembled – a bizarre bricolage of architectural styles and elements. Another was Wilfred Bion, whose War Memoirs are filled with sketch-maps ...”

“... are doing. Instead these banks seem, in the words of Manchester University anthropologist Karel Williams, ‘loose federations of money-making franchises’. One risk analyst talked about her bank as ‘a nation engaged in perpetual civil war’, while a trader said: ‘You have to understand, it’s us against the bank.’ The rules, the laws, are ...”