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“... dead except for Empson and myself) and was delighted at how well we all got on together. ‘King of the Cats’ (to use Yeats’s phrase about himself), to whom we all paid homage, was Basil Bunting, now in his eighties, who wrote his masterpiece, Briggflatts, at the age of 65 on returning to the North of England, after many years of adventurous Middle ...”

“... on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as moles. The King spoke of his nephew the Kaiser planning to land an army corps and proclaim that, as a grandson of Queen Victoria, he was ready to free the King from ‘the Socialistic gang which is ruining the country’; Parliament voted ...”

“... for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as normal or exceptional. It is, for example, perfectly true to say that the ...”

“... Henry England, a.k.a. Hal Nine (aristocracy). Henry is ‘in a ridiculous situation’: he is King of England. More precisely, he is Henry IX. (We are in a parallel universe. And perhaps, in another parallel universe, a parallel Martin Amis is dreaming up a potplant-lecturing, tampon-envying Charles III.) Henry has a tremendously posh voice (‘My ...”

“... at West Dean during Willie’s lifetime. Edward denied this on the grounds that not only was the King always accompanied by either Queen Alexandra or Mrs Keppel, but Willie James was too honourable to perform the role of mari complaisant – although, again according to Edward, he accepted that his youngest daughter Audrey was the child of Sir Edward ...”

“... and, occasionally, terror. Halley’s comet appears on the Bayeux Tapestry as a harbinger of King Harold’s doom. It was probably first spotted by the ever-watchful Chinese. In 840 AD an imperial edict in China forbade astronomers to mix ‘with civil servants and common people in general’ lest their knowledge of these terrible objects incite popular ...”

“... is nothing with stronger criminal intent than the genteel purloining of a typescript, except in Desmond Hogan’s ‘Elysium’, where the heroine shacks up with an Irish terrorist. Hogan inclines towards a rather woozy poetry, but at least he reaches beyond the domestic mode omnipresent in the other stories: An outrage was done in this house once. A young ...”

“... universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa Library, now bitterly inveighing against the Coloureds for their refusal to vote for the ANC. Such people – I’m one myself – feel they want to be here ...”

“... is likely to ring hollow in a down-at-heel colony. Contemporary Irish philosophers like William Desmond and Joseph Dunne have inherited this anti-rationalist bias, either in postmodern or Wittgensteinian mode. It says much about this wariness of pure reason that Toland, the country’s most militant rationalist thinker, also traded in the occult. (He was ...”

“... bias’ in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development – 24 hours before the introduction of hefty new levies that would have cost the Conservative donor an estimated £45 million. A few weeks earlier, Desmond, the former owner of the ...”

“... approval’ of ‘wits so exquisite and discriminating’ as Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor; on the publication of a book of poems a flurry of plaudits – ‘grimly entertaining’, ‘brilliantly funny and intimate’ – is produced. Barbera and McBrien summarise and categorise her output according to theme; they treat her ...”

“... As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up, like Fay Wray, squeezed in its paw. A.M. Gibbs spends most of the introduction to Bernard Shaw: A Life justifying his decision to return to a very well-ploughed furrow ...”

“... convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in ...”

“... is the ethical imperative it carries, recognised by thinkers including Ludwig Feuerbach and Desmond Tutu: if human beings are interconnected, then an injury done to one is an injury done to all. But Newman’s medieval case studies also suggest a more troubling possibility: that a person’s sense of self can dissolve under the pressure of external ...”

“... Since his case has remained uncontested by the entire musical profession and most critics (though Desmond Shawe-Taylor finds it ‘hard to decide’), the licence-payer is entitled to insist on learning the BBC’s own precise, concrete, practical and ethical reaction, which, despite some defensive voices from elevated quarters, has not been as much as ...”