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“... his own pain: ‘It was too much about Bert’, his assailant in the hospice grounds, ‘and the woods and his parents and his grandparents and too much about how much it hurt not to be wanted in the way you wanted to be wanted.’ Not as much of an improvement on abortion trauma as he had hoped.Seamus doesn’t think much of the original Gorgon poem’s ...”

“... medium, sound. There is just one easy place to go to find out about all of these things at once: Oliver Sacks’s new book of three essays. Like all his writing, the essays are engaging, funny, informed, humane and speculative. One, a brilliant piece of journalism, describes the 1988 revolution – the word used by every deaf person I know – at Gallaudet ...”

“... outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.Not a direct verb in sight, no names or faces, only ...”

“... Small waves splashed against the hull and the hollow creak of oarlock and oar rose into the woods of black pine crusted with lichen. I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned other half of the world until, by a distant prompting, I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface a luminous room, a light-filled grave, saw for the first time ...”

“... evident, too, in the beautifully produced, unostentatious separate recent collections by Douglas Oliver and Anthony Barnett,* contributors to the Carcanet volume. ‘America’ is one acknowledged influence on these poets, though ‘America’ turns out to mean chiefly Ashbery, Olson and Pound. That there are other traditions to look to these days is clear ...”

“... it’s only recently that we’ve paid attention to the common ash at all. In Ancient Woodland, Oliver Rackham drew up a table, under the heading ‘The Notice Which People Take of Trees’, and mapped ‘the percentage frequency with which tree species are mentioned’ in two Anglo-Saxon charters, a comprehensive list of British place names, the works of ...”

“... entirely by the film’.Billy Casper would not have been altogether out of place in David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948). His physical meagreness identifies him from the outset as an archetypal waif. He’s about to leave school and has no prospects apart from the mine which employs his elder brother, Jud (Freddie Fletcher); there might not even be a job ...”

“... He left behind a poem that expresses the suffering he had witnessed: At evening the autumn woods resound With deadly weapons, the golden plains And blue lakes, the sun overhead Rolls more darkly on; night embraces Dying warriors, the wild lament Of their broken mouths. Yet silently red clouds, in which a wrathful god lives, Gather on willow-ground The ...”

“... replies: you should read some memoirs. A pity, because his history begins in the days when Sammy Woods could reside as a member of his college for 12 terms, playing rugger and cricket for Cambridge, while failing monotonously to pass the university entrance exam. Edwardian etiquette decreed that if you called on a fellow undergraduate and he was out, you ...”

“... confronted soldiers as they marched in thin lines across open fields or in dense, often burning woods. Three and a half million men were under arms: virtually the entire military-age population of the South and a good proportion of the North as well. Very large armies – sometimes 100,000 to a side – fought scores of deadly pitched battles and hundreds ...”

“... the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced the slick financial Mephistopheles at the heart of the indictment. ‘Greed is good,’ purrs the villain, Gordon Gekko. Greed might just save that ‘malfunctioning corporation ...”

“... Snowden has been a subject of journalistic scrutiny for years and a hero of movies, including Oliver Stone’s somewhat misleading biopic. Snowden’s first job was as a web designer for a woman he had met in a Japanese class, a fellow anime enthusiast. They fell out after 9/11: he was all for the war on terror; she, a dove, moved to ...”

“... courage to be assessed?Williams’s story ‘One Arm’ (1948) is about a promising boxer called Oliver who has an amputation after an accident and starts to sell his body. He isn’t particularly shocked to learn his ‘commodity value’, but what is referred to as his ‘speechless self’ moves towards destruction. Drunk, he kills a stockbroker on his ...”

“... with convincing ease: When I hear the English tongue Like a whistle, but even shriller – I see Oliver Twist among A heaping of office ledgers. Go ask Charles Dickens this, How it was in London then: The old City with Dombey’s office, The yellow waters of the Thames. There is a salubrious élan about much of the book, and the fact that this is indeed a ...”

“... way he and Lynch composed Laura Palmer’s theme for Twin Peaks (‘OK, Angelo, we’re in a dark woods now, and there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees’) that is the closest you’ll get to crawling inside Lynch’s head. The idea of a literary Lynch is more curious. By his own admission, he was not a big reader and his aversion to ...”