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“... fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ambitions,’ she writes in her introduction. Curtis had no doubt about ...”

“... suddenly they all knew much more than I did – the names [of LMS loco engineers] Stanier, Fowler, Hughes, and class names and tractive efforts were being trotted out constantly. I caught up pretty quickly … every afternoon after school a crowd of us wandered down to Green Lane Bridge [on the Manchester-Bolton line] to jot down numbers and – sometimes ...”

“... Adult responsibilities are represented as almost unbelievably dull. In The Society of the Poem Jonathan Raban argued that a significant number of post-Movement poets accepted the daily rituals of the postwar world as nearly sufficient for the inner life: ‘The imprints of the same mass images, the same commuting time-schemes, the same communal hopes and ...”

“... as the creator of mankind, a tradition followed by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, rendered by Ted Hughes as follows: Then Prometheus Gathered that fiery dust and slaked it With the pure spring water, And rolled it under his hands, Pounded it, thumped it, moulded it Into a body shaped like that of a god. Though all the beasts Hang their heads from ...”

“... a senior Conservative on the council, was jailed for six years for fraud and forgery. In 1999 Jonathan Aitken, Tory MP for South Thanet for 14 years, got 18 months for perjury. Last year, the former Tory leader of the council, Sandy Ezekiel, was sentenced to 18 months for abusing his powers to buy two neighbouring properties in Margate, one of them owned ...”

“... of English Poetry (1702), Anthony Ashley-Cooper praised it in his Characteristicks (1710), John Hughes discussed it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In Derzhypilsky’s production, having been performed beautifully in ...”

“... 2’ in History is a 14-line redaction of that, ending ‘my namesake, not the last Caligula’ (Jonathan Raban once suggested that Lowell’s idea of ‘revision’ was to throw on more negatives). As for ‘Caligula 1’ – that’s a revision of a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ that first appeared in Imitations. And so on, and so on, and so ...”

“... articulate much of what Auden called ‘nuance and scruple’, but then it never set out to. As Jonathan Raban once said, Carey was ‘the hatchetman’s hatchetman’. In his autobiography Carey recalls his early scholarly tasks of editing Milton and of compiling a student anthology of critical essays about Andrew Marvell, experiences that awoke him to the ...”

“... dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while ...”

“... Forest? The long-haired freak who shoots up Coca-Cola in ‘Come Together’ is, of course, Howard Hughes. And did you ever notice that the famous Abbey Road cover shot is centred around a vanishing point?Again, it’s hard to think of anything comparable involving the Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ‘mysterious’ death of ...”

“... to think of writers whom he didn’t work with than ones whom he did. He had known and published Hughes and Plath while at Cambridge, he had published Seamus Heaney’s first poems to a wider audience at the New Statesman, he had been taught by Leavis and had fallen out with him when he went to work in London, he liked and commissioned Mary McCarthy and ...”

“... envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore second-tier oilfields in Iraq. He is a member of the politburo of the Carlyle Group, in which it is estimated he owns equity of $180 million – a sliver of their $17.5 billion ...”

“... the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with ...”