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“... this me? The fields are mined and the night is long; Stick with me when the shooting starts. Richard Murphy is not a reckless poet. Those who rate him surely rate him much too highly. Ted Hughes compliments him with the anti-reckless word ‘classical’ and with ‘the gift of epic objectivity’, and Seamus Heaney praises his ‘poised and appeased ...”

“... to create an open space suited to party rallies. On May Day 1937, Rudolf Hess laid the foundation stone of the Hall of the People’s Community, with standing room for two thousand. It is now a shopping centre. The huge administrative building for the local party remains, occupied by the Thuringian state government. Weimar is a place of memories and ...”

“... pretends to be scientific would disappear. Such a writing would be a new sort of philosopher’s stone, not one which locks within itself the whole light of the sun, but a sort of anti-heliotrope. Derrida ends ‘White Mythology’ by saying: ‘Heliotrope also names a stone, a precious ...”

“... professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the Nidderdale hamlet of ...”

“... so as to place her works ‘alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra’. What else to expect from curators capable of insisting that the true home of modern art was St Ives or Yorkshire? ‘Pretending that it was is complacent, insular and either intellectually dishonest or genuinely stupid.’ How dishonest are ...”

“... bald accounts of martyrdom; the mechanics at work, their gift of transformation. Torchlight and stone. She stripped to her shift unbidden and climbed up to the machine; when it took hold she was lifted clear of the bed, her body hard strung, the wrench and crack of ...”

“... Aline of brightly painted stone cottages, out there at the end of the world, beyond Allihies in West Cork. The cottages have been extensively tampered with, knocked through, until they form a single unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built ...”

“... the Pope to have his son Edmund made King of Sicily, and in Northern Europe by having his brother Richard of Cornwall crowned King of the Romans and thus, nominally at least, heir to the Imperial throne. The Abbey, therefore, was designed to underpin and promote Henry III’s regality. Binski, however, emphatically rejects the widely-held view that ...”

“... hard to think of any respect in which the Claimant resembled Roger. He was already 13 and a half stone, in contrast to the wraithlike Roger, and was to reach massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger ...”

“... of cheek. It makes the book’s death-of-the-author thesis look like a wink at the reader: the stone Buddha in Plath’s poem is smiling, after all. Artifice, for Forrest-Thomson, is less a way to disappear than to maintain one’s poise, holding life safely apart for a moment and stylising it. Midway through the final chapter, a discussion of Dadaist ...”

“... us ‘just about where we were’. An American writer on British intervention in the Civil War, Richard Ullman, managed to offend Carr. He unearthed some minutes, written by Carr as a junior official in the Foreign Office, which spoke quite warmly of the White cause. He used these in footnotes, and Carr’s review responded: it went on and on about how ...”

“... history of Picasso’s most famous painting – from obscure experiment to art-critical Rosetta Stone and blue-chip museum asset – while Buchloh meditates on the ways in which Russian avant-garde design helped invent postwar American fashion photography. After years lingering in Picasso’s studio, Krauss tells us, Demoiselles was bought, cheap, by the ...”

“... Some of his entries could be queried or supplemented. For example, chucky for a ‘small flat stone’ is certainly used in Aberdeen as well as in Galloway – I was taught it by my Scots-speaking aunt. Hirple for ‘limp’ is common in Scotland as well as in Northern Ireland, and clairt for ‘mud’ is usually spelled ‘clart’ (clairt is not given ...”

“... The Book of Jack London was needed. In 1934, Charmian was approached by a young biographer, Irving Stone, who had just produced his popular biography of Van Gogh, Lust for Life. Charmian liked Stone’s technicolour vision of the tormented painter and gave the go-ahead.’ Stone took as ...”

“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”