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“... to them – ‘out come the beautiful claws; our pet is not unarmed.’ Both sphinx and savage, the pet is an escape artist who has mixed feelings about her patrons. ‘Art is wild as a cat and quite separate from civilisation,’ Smith wrote elsewhere. She was not unduly concerned about what civilisation thought of her, although the voices in her ...”

“... according to Otho, ranged from ‘perpetual snubbing in private and public sarcasm, rudeness and savage scoldings’ to threatenings ‘with the fire-irons or having one’s head thumped against the wall’. On her mother’s remarrying in 1878, Constance moved into her grandfather’s large house at Lancaster Gate and began to display an interest in art and ...”

“... American confidence. These were the years in which Stanley Fischer, acting as itinerant bagman for Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, would disburse stand-by credits and loans from the IMF, in sovereign disregard of its statutes, according to the political value to Washington of incumbent regimes around the world. The two chief beneficiaries of his largesse ...”

“... and devastation were repatriated from outer space and the colonies. Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922) envisages England bombed back into the stone age. In The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) Anderson Graham has Britain pulverised by African and Asian bombers whose technological superiority is reviled as the fruit of the deluded British universities ...”

“... shrink’, Zenith writes, ‘from versifying his fantasies of being manhandled and possessed by savage pirates. Raw feeling – at turns euphoric, terrifying, violent, tender – welled out of him and took shape in poems that Pessoa could never have written under his own name.’ In ‘Maritime Ode’, Campos sought to outdo Whitman: ‘The arms of every ...”

“... the biography was commissioned, is depicted as saintly, which perhaps he was. Another ex, Robert Tracy, who proved difficult to dislodge from Nureyev’s apartment in the Dakota Building and has some unwelcome things to say about Nureyev and safe sex, gets it gratuitously and vicariously in the teeth: ‘that shit-boy’, a quote that looks like ...”

“... crimes violated. The persuasiveness of the argument that capital punishment is too blunt and too savage – more than is necessary to ensure the safety of the community, less than is needed to prevent similar crimes in the future – depends to some extent on the answer to an empirically decidable question: does the death penalty, as opposed to other ways of ...”

“... in a series of incidents that helped trigger the Civil War: events hauntingly recorded by Robert Payne, who was teaching at Lianda. Lung Yun, arrested and deported to Chungking, later escaped to Hong Kong. He ended his days, like Li Tsung-Jen, an honorific figure in the People’s Republic. In November 1937, as the Japanese swept the Nationalist ...”

“... distressed Islamic economies. But will such efforts bear fruit in time? Those who committed this savage act against generic Americans see the United States as a giant who walks unthinkingly across the earth, barely noticing the small peoples it crushes. In response, they burrowed under our skin, flew into our body and blew themselves up inside us. At long ...”

“... nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election ...”

“... be put on them. Yet they remain conventional, and surprisingly unaffected by contrary indications. Robert Brenner has shown, pretty conclusively, how little the onset of the Slump in America can be explained by wage repression, or the end of the postwar boom by wage explosion. He has also proposed a genuine theoretical explanation, of the kind Kondratiev was ...”

“... in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She wrote some great things – saw strangely – makes one shudder with new truths – but ever and again one feels (or ...”

“... their confident prescriptions for dealing with the gays. These range from impossible cures to savage punishments – imprisonment, flogging, castration, deportation. For this seventy-year-old gay English reader, Parker (who’s the same age as me) has clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to ...”

“... sent copies of poems they had been working on to famous poets, including the poet laureate Robert Southey. We don’t have Charlotte’s letter to Southey, or know which poems she sent, but parts of her letter are quoted in his and show her extravagant style of praise – she begs him to ‘stoop from his throne of light and glory’ – which he ...”

“... thinking a thatched roof was the height of exotic. Everything changed for me with the discovery of Robert Burns: those torn-up fields out there were his fields, those bulldozed farms as old as his words, both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual ...”