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“... are the world to us,’ as Shelley once put it. The morning star dwindles in the growing light of day until it is no longer there except as an intuition or perhaps a fiction: Shelley charms the star into what Thomas Hardy – a great admirer though a very different sort of poet – once called ‘existlessness’. And, to add to the sense of ...”

“... Grow Old’ (1945), an airman sees row on row of angelic aeroplanes flying into ‘a bright white light, shining bright and without any colour’ in a story that gives a gritty top-dressing of Hemingway to a wartime visionary mode that anticipates Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death by a couple of years.Dahl’s injuries led to headaches and ...”

“... Hannity, Alex Jones, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and ‘the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all’ – Donald Trump (you imagine he would relish the superlative). Like his counterparts around the world, Trump built a superfaction from sons of the soil who feel downgraded. He ‘put the grievances of white, male, Christian, rural Americans into a simplified ...”

“... to sleep’). Writing to friends became one means of doing that talking – and of keeping the light on. The poetry too has the air of something written at night and against night; his first published poem, composed when he was 15, is titled ‘La Noche Triste’. Recalling those formative years on the Derry farm, he said: ‘I always liked to sit up all ...”

“... dangerous sentence let fall by another of Browning’s characters, Mr Sludge: ’Really I want to light up my own mind.’ The equivocal qualms with which we listen to Blougram and Sludge suggest something of Browning’s odd and striking position as a writer. Post-Romantic art created for itself a ‘Palace of Art’ as refuge from the philistinism of an ...”

“... Grammar School, Rada and an acting job with a touring Shakespeare company in Ireland, a job with Donald Wolfit, a few years in rep, attention as a playwright for The Room (1957), and The Birthday Party (1958), sudden and extravagant fame for The Caretaker (1960). Pinter married the actress Vivien Merchant in 1956; they had a son, Daniel, in 1958. Pinter ...”

“... readiness to surrender liberty and believe the absurd. The enduring interest of this period is the light it throws, or fails to throw, on the matter of American insecurity. Whittaker Chambers is the essential symptomatic miniature here. And, when we consider how he unwittingly saved Saul Bellow for American letters, we are guided in the right direction. Much ...”

“... Late at night, or the strangling of a river To give shape to its fall. There is no candle here to light us to bed: ‘Ode to a Poetess’ the poem is called, an expansive title by McGuckian standards, but not very illuminating. The two sentences above work by the same principle, an initial ‘subject’ producing a double set of explanatory analogies. But ...”

“... radio producer, who in the early 1950s was overseeing a weekly factual series for the BBC Light Programme. It occurred to him to try to transfer the populist documentary style to the new medium. In 1952 he made contact with another producer looking for a TV project, Andrew Miller Jones. Miller Jones was an ex-Army officer with a yellow ...”

“... Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...”

“... husband and wife leadership team, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, launched Operation Eternal Light. After Saddam’s failure to topple the regime in Iran, this was intended to be the big push that would finally win control of the country. Success, Rajavi told his fighters, was inevitable because the Iranian people, both civilians and military, would ...”

“... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...”

“... resistance has to do with the centrality of military strategy in contemporary policy-making. Donald Rumsfeld and others like him have apparently calculated that climate change will enhance rather than detract from the country’s long-term security. The US, with its flexible economy, temperate location, low population density and access to Canadian ...”

“... foes thou hast, one there one here,/One far one ultimately near,/Two filthy fogs blot out thy light:/The German, and the Sodomite.’ The pamphlet ran into four editions and sold thousands of copies, but although he had had the pleasure of seeing several of his enemies and old acquaintances ruined, in jail or, at the very least, visited by the ...”

“... When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters ‘unlawful combatants’ (as opposed to ‘regular’ prisoners of war), he did not simply mean that their criminal terrorist activity placed them outside the law: when an American citizen commits a crime, even one as serious as murder, he remains a ‘lawful criminal ...”