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“... contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened Ground. Of course, nothing in Heaney’s late poetics can change ...”

“... there with capricious abandon, simply to annoy us, the children of future generations’. Thomas Hughes vividly revealed in Tom Brown’s Schooldays how Latin verses were composed, as boys desperately sewed shreds and patches drawn from the Gradus ad Parnassum into verses that could be scanned and more or less made sense. Even some great writers of ...”

“... So, too, in his later novels about women, The Doctor’s Wife (1976) and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981), the social detail, the dialogue and even the characters are brisk, with a strange lack of nuance and shadow. Sheila, the doctor’s wife, has various conversations with her husband which read like early, hastily-written drafts. Her American lover ...”

“... first Oxford Book (‘the best is the best’). But in neither does Ricks find time to explain why Derek Walcott, who once confessed to wanting to be ‘not a poet but an anthology’, has been invited to jump the editorial immigration queue. At six times fewer pages than the next entry (Anthony Thwaite), the answer may be that his is a tourist visa. As their ...”

“... teaching jobs, in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each ...”

“... had also returned a verdict of suicide. To add to the confusion, the immigration minister Beverley Hughes told the House of Commons in 2003: ‘There have been two apparent self-inflicted deaths in immigration removal centres in the last five years.’ It was only after persistent and repeated requests for information about Nsimba that I received a curiously ...”

“... intended. Yet evangelicalism fed a hunger for righteousness and an appetite for spiritual victory. Derek Walcott was right to say that it is simplistic to regard conversion as ‘Christian treachery that seduces revenge’.Justified anger is tenacious, and, as Phillips’s Cambridge discovers, it can be hard to manage. Writing about her native Antigua a ...”