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“... to turn out the daunting titles advertised in literary magazines: Milton and the Postmodern, Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination, Myths and Texts: Strategies of Incorporation and Displacement. The one question rarely addressed is: who reads these books and what purpose do they serve? I can imagine looking up a name in James Hart’s fifth edition ...”

“... One of Donald Davie’s early poems, and one of his strongest, is ‘Pushkin: A Didactic Poem’, from Brides of Reason (1955). As in Davie’s ‘Dream Forest’, Pushkin is taken as a model, a poet Who recognised no checks Yet brooked them all – a mind Molten and thereby fluent, Unforced, easily strict. In this didactic poem the speaker is professional, drawing his comparisons with rehearsed casualness: In the matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets ...”

“... contributors to Autopia grapple with these problems, but for the most part not very energetically. Allen Samuels tells us that the car ‘like all epochal icons . . . does not mean one thing, but many things’. In that sense it is an ‘empty sign. It is a vacuum. We fill it with meaning.’ Some of the contributions to Autopia suggest that any meaning will ...”

“... side, immortalised in 2000 in a video that showed him sashaying in matronly drag and preening for Donald Trump like a cross between Barbara Cartland and a funeral bouquet, a grotesque flirtation that proved prophetic. These two were fated to be mated. As the courtier, roving fixer and tireless mouthpiece for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would ...”

“... When Les Murray writes, ‘the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear,’ or when Allen Curnow writes, ‘the small wind instruments in the herons’ throats / play an incorrigible music,’ there is in each case the shock of something quite particular, and of language forced to find a way of matching it. Someone is forgetting himself and ...”

“... in their Thirties successors, the Nashville Agrarians – Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, to name the most prominent. Turning to more recent times, Genovese relies on the anti-modernist commentaries of Richard Weaver, a Southern sociologist in Chicago, and Melvin Bradford, a literary ...”

“... Not Be Washington, a consideration of Lee’s failure to defend his country in its hour of need. Allen Guelzo’s new study goes further. An unusual figure in the American academy – an eminent Civil War scholar who is also an outspoken conservative – Guelzo gave an address at Trump’s Conference on American History in 2020. But his portrait of Lee owes ...”

“... half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile ...”

“... of lyric poetry even when some of them, as in the case of Charles Simic’s jagged narratives or Donald Davie’s complaints, refuse the lyric. In her Introduction to Soul Says, she celebrates the lyric as a kind of charmed quarantine. It is a place where ‘the details associated with a socially specified self’ are stripped away. The ‘all-purpose ...”

“... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...”

“... on green paper, if I remember, and featured strip cartoons of Laurel and Hardy, Flanagan and Allen, Arthur Askey, and Old Mother Riley the female impersonator.) I support this project, and I want it to be carried out skilfully, not clumsily. (‘Comic Cuts’ is an amazingly inventive account of a marathon drunken conversation, almost wholly in direct ...”

“... South Africa. In those still white-dominated days, men like Swanton, the MCC treasurer Gubby Allen, Griffith and the retiring MCC president, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, exercised an inordinate influence throughout the cricket world. The D’Oliveira affair marked a key defeat for this Lords-centred elite, which was on intimate terms with its counterparts in ...”

“... the ears of the Dulles brothers: John Foster Dulles, secretary of state, and his little brother, Allen, head of the CIA. Both were former legal advisers to United Fruit. Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger’s classic history of the coup, Bitter Fruit (1982), showed that many of the players behind it were either United Fruit stockholders, or angling for a ...”

“... after white supremacists held their ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had ...”

“... in August 1956, just as the Suez Crisis was brewing. Ever since the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean five years earlier, he’d been living in something of a twilight zone. Intercepts of Soviet communications decrypted by the Venona Project had pointed to there being a ‘third man’ inside British intelligence who had helped Burgess and Maclean ...”