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“... sexuality – in fact there’s a line in None to Accompany Me that could have come straight from Lawrence (substitute ‘loins’ for ‘thighs’): he still had beautiful, strong legs, the ankles and knees perfectly articulated, the thighs – so important if a man is to be a good lover – frontally curved with muscle under smooth black hair. None to ...”

“... Mrs Fitzgerald described the adolescent Mew’s attachment to her Gower Street headmistress, Lucy Harrison, who had cropped hair, a passion for the work of Alice Meynell and Emily Brontë, and who eventually eloped with another schoolmistress to Yorkshire. Charlotte Mew copied the crop and thrilled to the readings of Alice Meynell’s ‘To a Daisy’. When ...”

“... at the age of 58, the structure he had created proved its durability, and his successor, Brian Harrison, another Oxford historian, was able to bring the whole enormous project to completion on the date that Matthew had laid down 11 years before. It is tempting to think of Matthew and Harrison as the Stephen and Lee of ...”

“... Turpin belonged to a gang of poachers in Essex. When they robbed a 70-year-old farmer, Joseph Lawrence, in 1735, they beat him on the bare buttocks, poured boiling water over him, and sat him on the fire in order to force him to say where his money was kept. Turpin played an active part in torturing Lawrence, though not ...”

“... home? Answering the pulls and torsions of that question produces much of the verse of Heaney, Harrison and Dunn, but it also produces very different kinds of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of ...”

“... Such portraits undercut the serious, ‘natural’ masculinity in poets like Ted Hughes and D.H. Lawrence, who may seem like soft targets now. Yet the same poems pursue more difficult truths about bodies in general: we, like our cows, are made of calcium and hormones, gums and bones, even as we are made of hope and anomie, which dissolve before our bones and ...”

“... of Louis XIV’s Paris made endless risible plans for the ‘French’ community in the St Lawrence estuary. But it is unlikely that any or all of this would have worked without an idea of synchronicity to which the authors of this volume make only glancing reference. Here we may recall, not only the existence of a long-established world-chronometry ...”

“... Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a bride-like, much played-on Victorian guitar), and a couple of much better ones ...”

“... anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer ...”

“... Meanwhile he was supposed to be studying English literature at Oxford, where he befriended T.E. Lawrence, whose wartime adventures Graves was to relate in a rather Boy’s-Own style in Lawrence and the Arabs (1927). In the early 1920s he and Lawrence planned their very own Boy’s Own ...”

“... is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis ...”

“... of the Mycenaean world. In dealing with the Cambridge anthropologists, he observes that Jane Harrison tended to depreciate Olympian religion in comparison with the ‘primitive’ kinds of worship to which she and her colleagues called attention, but that Gilbert Murray defended it, seeing it as representing a further stage in the advance towards ...”

“... turns up again in his proper historical situation (along with Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Jane Harrison, Jessie Weston, Freud – Totem and Taboo – and Dracula), he is judged with more disinterest. Less important than Mauss’s work, less profound than Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans, carrying too much encyclopedic luggage, enjoying too much success as a ...”

“... Alfred the Great (who earns the mysterious plaudit that ‘there was something about him of T.E. Lawrence’) gets credit for proscribing as treason any plot against the life of a feudal superior, and Henry VII for backdating his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in ...”

“... voice as well as a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of ...”