Search Results

“... think it is wonderful poetry … they affect me immediately and profoundly.’ Then she quoted Hardy: ‘What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorisation, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that.’ She went on: I’m sure my point is only too plain … Lizzie is not ...”

“... Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first appear as part of a socialist Mayday feature in 1944. Doris Lessing, so she now claims, grew hysterical; Clough, who briefly belonged to Jimmy Maxton’s Independent Labour Party, mostly ...”

“... this key. And in a certain phase of life – with male adolescents it may come from a reading of Thomas Wolfe – the gratification of such writing can be immense. How much of Agee is like this? Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the most ambitious and fully worked of his books, and the solemnities of diction, circumstantial proofs of localism, and care ...”

“... little to offer but smudged photos of the dead on commemorative mugs: Freddie Mercury, Laurel and Hardy, Princess Di. ‘Small dolls £1.99.’ The afterburn of celebrity as a memorial ashtray. Greenwich is deeply ambivalent about the whole Millennium Experience scam. Most of the place – the area around the Cutty Sark, phase one of the Dreadnought Library ...”

“... object-choices – Ferenczi’s love life, with its mother-daughter triangle, is the plot of a Hardy novel – and he listened carefully to the raised temperatures around him, the fever for interpretation, licensing the new candour while keeping his counsel. His own practices flowed around his precepts: he made up rules, ignored the rules established in ...”

“... battened off Brydan, an ambiguously-gifted Welsh poet with something of the mythic status of Dylan Thomas; now there is nothing in his work but second-rate Brydan: ‘If I say it’s too much like Brydan I mean not just Brydan himself but a whole way of writing, and I suppose thinking, that concentrates on the writer and draws attention to the chap, towards ...”

“... company’s factory seven time zones away in Vietnam – had been intense to the point of danger. Thomas Maguire was sacked in 2018 for refusing to follow an order. He was told to use a heavy-duty forklift called a reach stacker to move a tower section. The section, a steel cylinder weighing about a hundred tonnes, lay on its side, a temporary ring attached ...”

“... dispelled.The pyramids. Camels. Roller-skating at the Rialto rink. Open-air cinemas (Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Tarzan). Looking sharp in the blazer and cap of the Gezira Preparatory School. The aquarium in Fish Park on the walk to school. Singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ at assembly. Climbing banyan trees behind the Gezira Club ...”

“... Three women sat talking on one of the sofas. The bookshelf was packed with novels, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Leon Uris’s Trinity, The Fall of the House of Usher. We could hear cars and lorries whooshing over our heads on the Westway. ‘One woman from the tower,’ Bev said, ‘it had taken her nearly fifty years to get to where she was just before ...”