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“... who is also, as it happens, a foreigner. Another intrusive chapter in Pig Earth explains how close to the life of a peasant community it is possible to get if your main purpose is to represent it truly in writing. There is a certain helpful complicity, since peasants also represent their common experience by telling stories, but there are also obvious ...”

“... narrator, finds his partner collapsed in their garden, face up in the North Carolina sun. Frank will recover from the immediate effects of his stroke, but the book charts his decline into physical debility and dementia, as well as Wendell’s increasingly desperate efforts to care for him. Care doesn’t always look the way one might ...”

“... I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted the allusion. He wasn’t one of your bully-boys or guttersnipes, but the son of a Lincolnshire gentleman – in fact, after Tennyson he must be Somersby’s most distinguished son. He was educated ...”

“... Ian Hamilton’s masterly biography, first published in 1983, if only to provide more continuity, close some of the gaps in the story. He is thorough, lucid and just (admiring and condemning), and it is a bonus that his comments on the poetry – after all, our main reason for being interested in the poet – are so acute and sensitive. Of course Saskia ...”

“... scene setting. He could not offer a plywood Rialto or stage the starlit night at Belmont, or do close-ups of Jeremy Irons’s love-battered face; or show Antonio arriving in his gondola, Shylock dining wretchedly with Bassanio, or Jessica sitting excitedly in the women’s section of the synagogue. Moments inaccessible to language have to be left out: the ...”

“... prayer, rather as one feels anxious about sending important letters to large organisations. Anne Frank is the only Jewish saint. I first read the diary of Anne Frank when I was about the same age as she was when she began to write it. She seemed to me perfectly to fit the bill as a possible intercessor. Perhaps, in the ...”

“... not to attempt it. For, as he saw it, everything that could be said had already been said – by Frank Harris and others, including Shaw himself; and although Wilde was ‘incomparably great as a raconteur, and as a personality ... these points cannot be reproduced.’ There is obviously some truth in this; we can hardly imagine what it must have been like ...”

“... Some time around 1870 Frank Lloyd Wright (b.1867) was given a set of Froebel building blocks by his mother. He reckoned that playing with them set his imagination on the road his architecture would follow. Some sixty years later the grandmother of another Frank – Frank Gehry (b ...”

“... answer, if asked, but I beg you not to ask me these questions. HUAC: I withdraw the question. Frank Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, had been in the Party. He had been publicly outed as a Communist in 1947, two years earlier, when a Washington newspaper – almost certainly fed the information by the FBI – headlined the ...”

“... long spell in a mental hospital, given shelter and support by a white-goateed older writer called Frank Sargeson, played by Martyn Sanderson. She lives and types in his garden shed, finishes a novel, and sends it off to a publisher he has recommended. The novel is accepted and Sargeson waves at the garden gate as Frame leaves for Europe on a literary ...”

“... operas ‘to appear after the death of Leopold’. The opera itself, we are told, took its authors close to a vision of ‘a universe shorn of any redemptive or palliative scheme’, which makes it sound more like King Lear. The rest of the book is about Jean Genet, Lampedusa (and also Visconti’s film of The Leopard), Britten’s Death in Venice (and Thomas ...”

“... greater order of clarity. In Alien Homage he abominates ‘abbreviated categories which too often close enquiry before it has commenced. Some in the West are prisoners of vast undiscriminating categories ... and bring those ready-made slide-rules to measure, and often to obliterate, the complexities of the past.’ That could stand as motto for all three ...”

“... the great canvas of the Cold War were already under way in the Balkans in the summer of 1944 when Frank Thompson was executed. Bulgaria was a member of the Axis and Frank, older brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, was on a mission in the country for Special Operations Executive: the idea was that anti-Nazi partisans ...”

“... French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of Conrad’s extant correspondence – close to 1500 letters – has not yet been made available.’ Since Professor Karl, who makes this statement, elsewhere speaks of 3500 known letters, the mathematics seems a bit hazy, though in his biography, published four years ago, he says there are nearly ...”

“... and although there is no mention of a sequel we needn’t be surprised that one has turned up. Close Quarters has no such jury-rigged ending as its predecessor; it constantly and disingenuously advertises its structural inferiority to the first novel, and stops suddenly, with a puff for a third volume which is to contain adventures even more frightful than ...”