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“... that he has decided to live for the sake of those whose warm feelings he had misunderstood.’ In Martin Seymour-Smith’s Robert Graves: His Life and Works Dunn is described as the man who saved Graves’s life, though Dunn does not mention so routine a matter. The most interesting reference to Sassoon in Dunn’s text arises from his ‘quixotic ...”

“... Sometimes,’ Philip Larkin wrote in a letter, ‘I think I’m preparing for a huge splenetic autobiography, denigrating everyone I’ve ever known: it would have to be left to the nation in large brass-bound boxes, to be printed when all of us are dead.’ In the event he arranged to have his diaries shredded a few days before his death in 1985 ...”

“... atmosphere on arrival. It was discovered later that engineers working for the contractor, Lockheed Martin, had programmed the software to give altitude data in imperial units, while those of its partner, Nasa, had used metric – a three hundred million dollar oops. But no one died. And it is death or its prevention, more so even than money, that is the ...”

“... to find him composing a verbal emblem book, Gli Eroici Furori. This was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney in 1585 and exercised a profound influence upon Elizabethan poetry. In devising and explaining his visual conceits, Bruno aimed to transform the increasingly stale conventions of Petrarchan love poetry into philosophically significant devices. His ...”

“... he was born: there, he began the long, slow process by which he abdicated in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand. It was abundantly clear why such a transfer of power was necessary. It was a cold winter and Charles, white-haired, with shrunken gums exposing blackened teeth, his joints so crippled by gout that he was unable to sign documents with ...”

“... than the script for a video nasty. Young male novelists routinely seek to give maximum offence. Martin Amis did so in 1975 by calling a novel Dead Babies. In The Wasp Factory Banks recounted acts of child-on-child sadism in a deadpan. Holden Caulfield monologue which suggested that serial killing was a minor rite of passage, as insignificant in adult ...”

“... In the midst of writing his biography of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion was contacted by a spiritualist who claimed to have been speaking to Larkin in the Beyond; later Larkin sent a posthumous word of approval for the book. Could the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission ...”

“... his major task. As for Elliott’s studies of the court and palaces of the Count-Duke’s master, Philip IV, and of the revolt of the Catalans against their joint regime, they complement rather than compete with the book now under review. There are two obvious reasons for this neglect of a major Spanish statesman. The first is that he failed, while his rival ...”

“... anything like me, you will find yourself having to fight off a sort of sinking feeling as the new Philip Roth comes thudding into your life. What If A Lookalike Stranger Stole Your Name, Usurped Your Biography, And Went Around The World Pretending To Be You? the jacket flap blares: oh God help us, here we go again. You know there will be a lot of paranoid ...”

“... our Blackpool photos from those years/and, I’ll bet, in every family’s South Pier snap’) and Philip Larkin (‘We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls/In parodies of fashion, heels and veils’) hit the same sweetly rasping note as Tish Murtha’s unemployed man and his family in Newcastle, Martin Parr’s ...”

“... Sittow, who came from Reval (now Tallinn in Estonia) and had been trained in Bruges. Again, when Philip II wanted his new monastery-palace of the Escorial decorated, he summoned whole teams of painters from Italy, one group in the 1560s, and another, more distinguished, in the 1580s (the latter group included Luca Cambiaso, Federico Zuccaro and Pellegrino ...”

“... from within, from a recognition and rejection of human alikeness between watcher and villain. Martin Scorsese’s brutal, dazzling film about everyday life in the lower ranks of the Mafia, GoodFellas, plays with this gothic scheme of the watcher drawn into the criminal underworld, but with an irony that partly accounts for the work’s shocking impact. We ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and another on the ‘black experience’ of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk ...”

“... Clearly, for Martin Amis, enough is nothing like enough. To read him is to discover an author as voracious as his characters: like Terry in Success, who specifies that ‘I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that.’ Or like the fast-food, fast-sex junkie John Self of Money, who always gets less than he bargains for, yet keeps going back for more: ‘I would cheerfully go into the alchemy business, if it existed and made lots of money ...”