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“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in Florida, where her father was an ...”

“... 1941 America First rally in Des Moines, maintained that the ‘greatest danger to this country’ lay in Jewish ‘ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government’. In its way, Urwand’s view of Hollywood is just as blinkered. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, set up in the summer of 1936, is referred to only in ...”

“... who first spotted its potential as an organising tool.* You can see why people might want to lay claim to ‘We are the 99 per cent’: it’s a brilliant slogan and an increasingly successful brand, doing its work on T-shirts and banners around the world. But it’s a half-baked idea. The problem is that 99 per cent is far too many. Majorities on that ...”

“... The overlapping vehicles aren’t heading the same way. Woolf, like Eliot (or for that matter like Paul Nash or Stanley Spencer, both brought in as supporting testimony), was by the late 1930s a middle-aged artist with a reputation to live up to, or live down: in each of these acts, a major dynamic had become internal dialogue. Piper by contrast remained as ...”

“... at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colours, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail. The birds of our world were black motes in that tropic. ‘It doesn’t seem to get any lighter,’ I said.    ‘It will,’ Lucille replied. The book’s ...”

“... possessed an enormous amount of what today is known as ‘social capital’. And in that lay the source of their eventual collapse; for in their determination to maintain cultural coherence in a foreign environment, they made no attempt to learn from the native inhabitants – the Inuit – about the local ecology and the reasons the latter relied on ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... to listen to such people.’ Not a very sensible thing for a self-styled elder statesman to say. Paul Scheffer, a left-wing columnist with political ambitions who became famous by taking a very public stance against multiculturalism, grew quite excited when Michael Ignatieff’s name came up in his conversation with Buruma. ‘You and I meet for the first ...”

“... place by chance in Paris, on the afternoon of 28 June 1964. Paz describes it in Viento Entero. In Paul Blackburn’s translation:              The fallen birdbetween rue Montalembert and rue de Bacis a girl              held backat the edge of a precipice of looks. . .A marching battalion of ...”

“... his safety pin tried various tricks, sometimes cruel, to produce a reaction. In The Conspirators, Paul Henreid managed to get her to look flustered by telling her ‘that with the lights behind her I could see right through her negligée’. The director of The Strange Woman rapped her on the ankles and the knuckles with a baton. Barton suggests that her ...”

“... O’Rowe, which first aired in 2020. One of the reasons the TV series bettered the novel, I think (Paul Mescal aside, come on), was that the ending was more realistic. In the final episode Marianne tells Connell, who is considering studying in New York, that they’ll be all right. In the novel, she says she’ll ‘always be here’. There is some ambiguity ...”

“... of the postwar Italian culture over which the PCI, directly or indirectly, presided. But behind it lay much older traditions that accorded pre-eminence to the realm of ideas, conceived as will or understanding, in politics. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy never knew a peninsular state or aristocracy, and most ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... make little sense because he doesn’t give us so much as a hint of the coercive menace that lay behind them. For instance, he describes the Blair government’s response to the fuel blockade in 2000 as a victory for his principled position that ‘whatever we did had to be justifiable on wider policy grounds.’ He makes no mention of Blair’s threat ...”

“... men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes ...”