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“... and she liked him as a man’. Now she oversaw the poet’s legacy with canniness and care. When John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his ...”

“... a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the boys wanting to go to Cambridge ...”

“... sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... fat, alcoholic, suicidal’, Agee sought protection by agreeing to become a full-time cook for Newton and Moses. Newton, now 77, soon asked her for a ‘date’, and she duly became his mistress, leaving Sprecher – who was Newton’s patient – no choice but to surrender or lose contact with his child (he surrendered).In 1985 a group member ...”

“... UK’s forced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 had condemned John Major’s government to nearly five years of public disintegration, years in which the party’s anti-European ‘bastards’, as Major described them, reacted to the abrupt end of belief in Tory competence by doing their best to scupper his ...”

“... might have been true of the previous government,’ said one such official. ‘Blair and Cook have made clear that they have no interest whatever in things going wrong. The last thing the UK Union Presidency wants nextyear is to have the Italians really upset that they’ve been excluded. Nor do we want some kind of chaotic postponement. The ...”

“... above everything else in life, but for some sort of Robinson Crusoe game. You … dismissed the cook, who would have been happy to do some work in exchange for a stipend, and from morning to night you engage in inappropriate physical labour … I can only say, ‘Enjoy!’ – and still be upset that such intellectual forces are wasted in chopping ...”

“... or their modus amandi, by which he brought home the bacon and no visitors, while she – with a cook? a maid? – ran the household, cooked and gardened. Was she agoraphobic? Sociopathic? Clinically shy? Guarding his privacy, like a Rilkean wife? And what about him, was he cruel? A Bluebeard of one? Tyrannical? Ashamed? Just obsessively private? Visitors ...”

“... panics, his horse bolts, he faints and falls and breaks his hip. When the great surgeon (‘Sir John’) who tends him reluctantly confirms that he will never be able to ride again, Sainty ‘heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. “Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,” he said.’ From now on, Sainty’s lameness will be the useful badge of his ...”

“... The Sweet Smell of Success. I love Malkovich in Les Liaisons dangereuses. I love Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich; I love Adaptation. Brilliant idea! We could write a book about this! We could write a book about writing a book about this! Bad idea …’ In a way, Your Name Here is simply a scrapbook, attesting to an odd, tense friendship, told through ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... House (where I do not pee). It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the ...”

“... and he took to heart Eliot’s suggestion (in the 1930 preface to his translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase) that a poet is sometimes able to write poetry in what is called prose. In Parenthesis marries contemporary speech to the sovereignties of self-contained utterance, around which questions of genre arrange themselves as best they can. It ...”

“... would be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal ...”