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“... at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short poems. The speaker is looking for his girl, who has been taken away by a figure ‘as a god’. It ends:If you find anyoneanswering their descriptionplease let me know. I need themto carry the weight of my lifeThe old gods are gone. What lives onin my ...”

“... have seen it coming? The advance, I mean to say, of a mediocre but ruthless man without qualities? Philip Ziegler’s book charts the boy Wilson’s ghastly youth, replete with team spirit, sycophancy, Scout’s honour and a craving to please elders and authority. There it all is, if you can stomach the reading of it. (It used to be expressed in another ...”

“... not need to be told that the great scholar had told his interlocutor to kiss his arse. Latin, in short, played vital roles in the first modern age. From Prague to Peru, it served as the arena of literary artistry, the vehicle of scientific communication and the medium of common-room gossip. Individuals across Europe and beyond knew Latin as intimately, loved ...”

“... may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the passions. His argument is that we underestimate the positive potential of the ‘vehement passions’, long understood only as forces that must ...”

“... When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, ‘sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and short stories were quick to spot echoes … the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’ After the war, Ballard took a boat to Southampton with his mother and younger sister. In 1947, Edna and Margaret ...”

“... House of Saud, expected the Saudis to maintain sufficient unused capacity to compensate for any short-term market tightening or price volatility. It was Saudi Arabia that released oil to stall the OPEC price rises in 1973 and during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Within 24 hours of September 11, nine million extra barrels of Saudi oil were released to keep prices ...”

“... music into 20th-century society. It was the chance to understand the musicians and their world: in short, ‘the jazz scene’. I lived on the edge of the West End, and teaching at Birkbeck left most of the day free, so it was possible to combine my profession with the nocturnal and late-rising habits of the scene. My main base was the Downbeat Club on Old ...”

“... Imperatives are particularly frequent in refrains and closure devices, from which envoys are but a short digression away. Hollander’s preoccupation with the ‘reflexive troping’ of such self-referring devices is noticeable, and prompts the reflection that Melodious Guile may in some sense have turned out a poetics specifically of Post-Modernist ...”

“... which she was so fond into a series of prose poems. Angela once remarked that she finished reading Philip Larkin’s work feeling that ‘there must be more to life than this.’ With that remark in mind, the writer and critic Francis Wyndham observed that rich prose such as her own might make one feel that ‘there must be less to life than ...”

“... out on the journey across the Atlantic – architecture, for one, since there is a picture of Philip Johnson, unmatched with any reference in the text – though this can hardly account for the absence of more than a passing reference to film-making and marketing, the prefabrication of the best-seller in publishing or the promoting of the politician. Some ...”

“... return to the ‘little’ author I was in Suffolk for almost ten years while working on Monty? Philip Ziegler and others have written kindly about the final Monty volume, hoping that I will not abandon writing. I won’t: I have finished the manuscripts of two short novels since finishing the first draft of Monty last ...”

“... but to Los Angeles, where he is reincarnated as Raymond Chandler’s fast-talking private eye, philip Marlowe, apparently in search of his father. ‘Immram’ is not easy to follow, but then neither is Chandler, who once admitted that he, the author, could not himself make out exactly what was happening in The Big Sleep. His other masterpiece, The Long ...”

“... only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate what might have happened if Rahv and Mary McCarthy had made a go of it; a marriage between the most politically savvy and the most ...”

“... inclusiveness: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ For Prince Philip, the main enthusiast for abolition, it was presumably the agonising boredom. The passage of time has done little to improve the image of the deb. In so far as she still has a presence in the national imagination she is a figure of essential silliness, a ...”

“... in Germany. As he knew some French and German, Hecht was asked to interview the survivors. He told Philip Hoy, who has edited his Collected Poems (Knopf, £42), that ‘the place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after, I would wake shrieking.’ He also saw his own men machine-gun a group of German women and ...”