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“... In covering epic misfortune of the kind one reads about in Africa, all three have learned to talk straight from the shoulder, although Buckoke’s is slightly hunched under the white man’s burden and Kapuściński’s is often set to the wheel of invention, which makes much of his plain speaking deceptive. Only Blaine Harden keeps a respectable posture ...”

“... name of one of South Central’s most notorious black rap groups – they had an album called ‘Straight Outta Compton’ – is Niggas With Attitude, bowdlerised by record company executives to ‘NWA’. A few minutes later, I am a witness as George Hamilton, the actor and walker, or beard, to Hollywood matrons of a certain age, takes the air outside ...”

“... Selected Letters (1990) and a collection of prose, daybooks and papers (2007). In the interim Michael Davidson’s New Collected Poems (2002) had brought together about thirty published poems that were never collected, and a selection of about sixty unpublished poems, four of which date from the 1930s. Everything useful, it seemed, had been found and ...”

“... into Great Denmark Street, towards the wife he has not yet met.’ (Of course, he doesn’t go straight there, but ‘roars off to The Hut in Phibsboro, to see a man about a dog’.) Back in the present, Liam’s death, and Veronica’s need to go back over the facts of his life, is causing her to put her own life on hold. Veronica has a Saab 9.3 that she ...”

“... Stuart to readers as he is now, a fully-fledged gawd-help-us, and he may just grab their interest straight away. By the time they reach his childhood, it is a matter of genuine interest how he turned into the person that he is. So we’ll move backwards, in stages, tacking like a sailboat against the wind. Familiar time flow – out the window. Homogeneous ...”

“... of Heloïse and Abelard, and at the end of her life she charged her daughter to ‘set the record straight’ with the help of all her papers (she evidently was not aware of Millicent’s different notions of veracity). John Addington Symonds, on the other hand, did intend the astonishing Memoirs which he composed in 1889-90 – some three years before his ...”

“... acts done in his Lady Lettice’s time. Not forgotten his fowling piece in England nor the straight-bodied laundresses in the red petticoats during his abode in Flanders beyond the seas, of all the which Dudley denied not one point, hoping that St Peter because of his bald head had been a goodfellow in times past as well as he himself. St ...”

“... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...”

“... a third time. Trump was going to win Florida, despite the millions of dollars spent there by Michael Bloomberg, and he was storming ahead of his 2016 numbers in Ohio. The other swing states were closer, but they seemed to be moving his way. On CNN I registered the same dramatic shift in mood. A couple of talking heads looked to be on the verge of ...”

“... such excellent studies in the accurately entitled Literary Lives series (published by Palgrave) as Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989) or Caroline Franklin’s Byron (2000), not-very-literary biographies, some running to four hundred and more pages, continue to accumulate in the bookshops. There (presumably) they attract readers far more ...”

“... I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. For ...”

“... in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms’. On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do ...”

“... they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul Heinrich Mann. She had definite artistic talents, played the piano quite nicely and sang. My husband learned the entire ...”

“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... contemporary life, and in which normality (roughly defined as suburban life, middling marriage, straight sex, drugless culture) is shown up, with different degrees of irony or scepticism. A terrible artist’s snobbery is at work here, even in the best of these five books, Alice Hoffman’s Seventh Heaven and ...”