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“... The thin sad slates that cover up my home ... If so, we should remember that other poets, like Michael Schmidt, hear in Sisson’s verse ‘a dominant and subtle rhythm that owes its expressive freedom to a close reading of the work of Ezra Pound’. It may seem surprising that so bold a translator should be so angry at the modern versions of the ...”

“... versions were hawked in vain round the University Presses of North America: it was left to Michael Schmidt and Peter Jones of the relatively unfunded Carcanet Press to recognise the moral and cultural responsibility. In fact, I find my sympathy goes out to Drummond very easily indeed. I must declare an interest, for I was associated with Virginia ...”

“... in a girdered hive.(‘Let Me Measure My Prayer with Sleep’)Such lines exemplify something Michael Schmidt once identified in Graham’s voice as ‘a strange hostility towards the reader’. The influence of Dylan Thomas has often been noticed, and the effect of the densely packed verbalism is, as in Thomas, principally to imply the labour that ...”

“... calls ‘epistemic vigilance’. After John Ashbery died in September, his publisher in the UK, Michael Schmidt, wrote: ‘Now that the life is done the work will go on shaping and reshaping language and the ways it makes various worlds real.’ Ashbery’s poetry tracks experiences – the more inconsequential the better – and in sequences of ...”

“... minister, coming third with 56 votes in the Parliamentary Labour Party behind Callaghan’s 84 and Michael Foot’s 90. When Callaghan won on the second ballot (Jenkins having withdrawn), it would have been magnanimous to offer the Foreign Office to the colleague best-equipped to hold it. But Callaghan felt personally uncomfortable with a man whose record at ...”

“... of rebellion is depicted in many novels and films, from Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin to Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose. Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of July 1944 understood that their plan to murder Hitler and stage a coup was unlikely to come off. Instead of success, there would be the recorded fact that they had tried. They played ...”

“... Alpine pendant to Die Brücke, the movement around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in Dresden (the more westerly group was also the more international in outlook). Franz Marc’s ‘The First Animals’ (1913) There is something almost painfully joyful about the efforts of these often desperately poor and short-lived ...”

“... would squeak if you rubbed your thumb on it, Arkady thought’ – as well as an American kind: ‘Schmidt showed a smile as hard as a car grille.’ But we never forget that this intimate inside-view of Russia comes from an American writer – which isn’t such a bad thing: it works to the advantage of the novel that a double image, Russian and American, is ...”

“... unicorn, ‘the beast that never was.’ So it is oddly effortful to retrieve Andropov, Reagan, Schmidt, the medium-range ballistic missile, the Twin Track approach, Geneva, Paul Nitze and Yuli (Yuri?) Kvitsinsky (Kvitinsky?) and the Walk in the Woods. These are the characters and developments that frame James Buchan’s fourth novel. God knows they seemed ...”

“... think-tanks. The one ‘proof’ she offers for the Kremlin’s strategy is an interview by Michael Ledeen, editor of the Washington Quarterly Review (of the Georgetown Institute) with General Jan Sejna of Czechoslovakia, who defected to the United States in 1968. The General said nothing publicly on the subject of terrorism at the time of his ...”

“... the being of his own age. The novel in verse Spektorsky, and his quasiepical poems Lieutenant Schmidt and 1905 have much of the good qualities of his translations: that is, they achieve a wide but also meticulous impersonality of utterance, as if the poet, like his father the artist, were filling in canvases with professional skill and ...”

“... by Allied typists and then given a spurious attribution to men like Konrad Adenauer and Carlo Schmidt, and it has worked out quite respectably.I have always liked the old phrase about ‘the forging of a nation’. Most young nations carry false birth certificates, either some teleologically-twisted brand of history which proves that Slobodnian ...”

“... the social democratic hegemony of the last forty years seems to have been broken. Helmut Schmidt still reigns fairly securely in Bonn and Bruno Kreisky rather more securely in Vienna. Elsewhere, the social democratic lights are dimmed at best. One reason, no doubt, is simply that politicians and intellectuals like novelty as much as anyone ...”

“... active part in mass demonstrations. In the Eighties, though no firebrand, he helped topple Helmut Schmidt and, as late as 1994, was blocked by party elders, who considered him too unreliable to run for Chancellor. The aura of moderate pragmatism is quite recent. But there is no lack of charm: sturdy good looks, attractive thick voice, mischievous smile. Blair ...”

“... He was at various times Joe Liss, Joe Eligmann, James Smith, Joseph Schmidt, Charlie Silver, Charles Greenbaum, Abraham Ramer, Ludwig; these are just a few of his ghost-names. Silver had indeed been in New York City in the early 1890s, a low-grade thief, thug, jailbird and police informer. Convicted of stealing a couple of ...”