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“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... In an unpublished BBC interview with two scientific journalists, he said he had never had a ‘grand revelation’ which made him shout eureka; instead, a growing feeling of dissatisfaction with existing explanations acted as the stimulus for ideas and was then augmented by an ‘artisan’s pleasure’ in personal dexterity. An article written after his ...”

“... the part he didn’t want to play and thought he was wrong for. I flew to Los Angeles on the MGM Grand, and accepted an invitation to stay at the Bel Air Hotel which is, I suppose, as near Paradise as you can get. A friend said I should stay at the Beverly Wilshire because at least there were streets outside, but I can’t because of what happened to my ...”

“... can be simply poured out in a tirade like this, ignoring the contemporary reconstruction of grand theory in favour of a seer-like moral sensibility. The outstanding features of Selbourne’s tract are its indifference to theory and its malignant hostility to the deluded agents of abstraction; a relentless and fulminating castigation of the mob and its ...”

“... like Fuseli, Flaxman and Turner. (On one occasion the company appears to have been particularly grand: Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck – until one looks again and realises that this time the rectangle is not someone’s dining-table but Lord Bridgewater’s picture gallery.) Farington was a sociable man. Throughout the diary people and pictures are inextricably ...”

“... he lives in and calls his own. The following is from his poem ‘Planetist’: I love all windy, grand designs, all blashes Splattering the dark, heaving the moon High over spruces, under the weathered Cloud rivers turning in their beds. From the tip of my tongue to the pit of my stomach, From my eyeballs to the balls of my heels With my lanky body I ...”

“... with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking ...”

“... from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig Press, Galloping ...”

“... resort, watching a young couple having sex. In a set-piece inversion of the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, it is in this case the morally dubious old goat who watches from the dark as his beloved young Zinka (a ballet dancer turned yoga teacher whom he has only recently met) is clumsily ravished by her boyfriend Niko. It is just the first ...”

“... not make the preservation of sources’ anonymity a constitutional right capable of defeating a grand jury subpoena. But they left it open to states to enact legislation protecting journalists’ sources, and at least forty states have since done this. In other words, anonymity in US law is not a fundamental right but one of the instruments that can be used ...”

“... knocked on the classroom door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a politics lesson when David Cameron was declared the new leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 (‘He’ll never get it,’ our teacher had said a few weeks previously). I was there again in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was stepping down as prime minister and ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft. When asked about this, the second in command of the space force, David Thompson, said: ‘We don’t need to tell the world everything we’re doing.’ The US hasn’t yet made what aerospace analysts call the transition from ‘space operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of ...”

“... strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight years: grouchy, standoffish, a dissipated cleric. Ghosting everyone, ghosting poetry itself, Rimbaud stops writing aged nineteen and disappears like a magician’s ...”