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“... culturalists who run this very contemporary show: Miles Kington and Russell Davies, Alan Coren and Clive James, Malcolm Bradbury and George Melly. The parodied A’s have it: Douglas Adams (hitchhiking through a galaxy of fading stars), Woody Allen, Kingsley Amis, Anon, John Aubrey, Auden and Ayckbourn. An Auden parody is ...”

“... and with one another. Of the ‘List of Inhabitants residing in Calcutta’ drawn up for Lord Clive in 1766, only 129 of the 231 European males were British. The rest came from Portugal, the German states, Switzerland, Sweden, French Chandernagore and Ireland. Life in this frontier world, as Jasanoff says, was ‘never a two-sided saga of colonisers ...”

“... a kinship with that Ezra Pound are likely to be ignored. This is the case with the American poet John Peck, who, now in his late fifties, with a massive and challenging achievement behind him and the devotion of an active British publisher, is unknown not only to general readers but to those who think they know about modern poetry. To be strictly ...”

“... when they have been the intimidated colleagues of the late F.R. Leavis. ‘Unashamedly,’ says John Rathmell of Christ’s College, ‘a lyric and romantic poet in the tradition of Blake and Shelley’, thus grossly maligning both Blake and Shelley. (‘Unashamedly’, however, is correct.) Either the Times or the Telegraph had advance knowledge of the ...”

“... way of taking interesting linguistic risks, but not his way of outrageously surviving them. Clive James writes wonderfully well, of course. He is one of the most remarkable figures in British cultural life at the moment: a poet and gifted literary critic who is also genuinely liked by the mass audience. In crossing the border-posts in our culture he ...”

“... family imploded. Her mother fell ill with TB, her father delegated home life to the 14-year-old John and chaos ensued. In some ways it was liberating, as Boty recalled in the long interview she gave in 1965 to Nell Dunn for her book Talking to Women. With her mother in hospital or at home bedridden there was ‘a fantastic amount of freedom’, but there ...”

“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of ...”

“... Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey isn’t clear. One hopes Anne didn’t do to it what Samuel Pepys did to his pet monkey in ...”

“... controlled by the new kinds of social and aesthetic domination, and by such bogus concepts as Clive Bell’s ‘significant form’. As Diarist, she had an assiduous zest for social goings-on of any kind, and for the places where things were happening. But she had the snob’s fatal lack of independence, of the ability, essential to most good writers, to ...”

“... thinking, yet the move, it not divisive, Can’t help at this stage seeming indecisive. But John De Lorean shows more than strain In several parts of that uplifted face. The handcuffs induce shame on top of pain As in Los Angeles he falls from grace. Busted with many kilos of cocaine Packed nearly in a custom pig-skin case, He’s proved his gull-winged ...”

“... must have had a good deal to do with it. The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ crops up, reminding us of John Berger and his allegedly penetrating double squint. The authorial assumption which remains unquestioned at the end of the book – after 350 pages in which the word ‘spatial’ appears rarely fewer than three times per paragraph and sometimes twice in the ...”

“... at Windsor and if Her Majesty dips into this volume she may be puzzled by the stern tone in which Clive Wainwright endorses Pugin’s ‘quite proper’ renunciation of her ‘horrific’ furniture, most of which is considered too distressing to illustrate. In Dr Wainwright’s disapproval we hear an authentic echo of Pugin himself, who brought to English ...”

“... do is watch it And hope that this time our side doesn’t botch it. The Secretary of Defence, John Nott, Has made a whopping balls-up in the House. The Foreign Secretary’s on the spot, Loudly accused of being short of nous. The top gun-boat exponent of the lot, A prancing lion where once crouched a mouse, Is Michael Foot, who now speaks for the nation ...”

“... as he had been when Jenkins took it in the first place. It is the facetiousness that annoys. Is John Pilger really so dreadful? Can the Stephen Waldorf affair be taken lightly? Does Johnson have to talk about Greenham women as if he were an agent of Lord Gnome? The British Library will catalogue him under ‘Anecdotes, facetiae, satire etc’ – which is ...”

“... slow for the genre, and the tension keeps slackening into comedy. A small band of criminals led by Clive Owen has held up a bank in lower Manhattan and taken some forty hostages. Are they after the diamonds? Money? The banker’s Nazi papers? Something else? There are plenty of plot twists, but the comedy is much better than the tension was ever going to be. A ...”