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“... South Africa, he began a story written in a straightforward realist style in which white refugees gather on Robben Island (at that time Mandela’s prison) to escape the collapsing republic. The plot goes nowhere. Coetzee dismisses each false start with the word ‘abandoned’. Initially his hero is a forty-year old Greek man, an ex-teacher of ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... European allies. He also defended it in the House of Commons, and the foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, even appeared on television to defend American actions. At a televised ‘teach in’ in Oxford in June 1965, Stewart argued that ‘the future relationship between North and South could, in time, be a matter for the genuine free decisions of the ...”

“... in Britain that he is articulating, or to underestimate the support he is drawing from many white-collar workers, pensioners, unemployed and others, who feel that he at least is taking on Mrs Thatcher in a way that nobody else is. Two statistics reveal a lot about Mrs Thatcher’s Britain. One is the unemployment rate, which has more than doubled since ...”

“... Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise came soon after ...”

“... to fight his closed-shop policy got branded as Communists. He helped set JFK on his path to the White House, and he got quite cross when Attorney-General Bobby, whose father Joe had been a rival bootlegger in the Thirties, started to hound him. Connoisseurs still marvel at the brazen way he outmanoeuvred the law. The day the game was finally up, he had his ...”

“... stupidly discover, is their terrible lack of each other. Lottie paints her handsome house white all over, goes to Paris, sees old friends, gets entangled with a florid (and as it turns out kooky) Swiss tycoon. Harold retreats to Bournemouth, stares at the sea, meets an art student, takes her to Paris, falls out with her, stays on alone, and comes back ...”

“... through his secret, his unknowability.’ And later: ‘All the banned words, the secrets kept in white-washed vaults, the half-forgotten plots – they’re all out here now, seeping invisibly into the land and air, into the marrowed folds of the bone.’ There’s a paradox here, because the seeping secrets are still invisible, although out in the ...”

“... appearance, and the sound of a ‘voix nouvelle et blanche’ (‘new and white voice’) coming from her throat. She is not a person any more, just language, the way the god talks when he needs to talk to mortals.La Jeune Parque is a poem of 521 lines, divided into 16 sections. Each line has 12 syllables, and the lines rhyme in ...”

“... for the properly reformed, the ‘sacrament’ that seals this usurper’s claim to reunite ‘the white rose and the red’ was a piece of heretical mummery. No wonder then that the syntax of Richmond’s most conspicuous address to the theatre audience – ‘What traitor hears me, and says not “Amen”?’ – remains so dangerously ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... Mickey at story meetings’; until 1946 Disney also voiced him, in falsetto. In another new Life, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, the studio head is seen by animators acting out ‘how a Chinese turtle should dance’, or doing ‘any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything – he all of a sudden was a valet.’ One such episode was burned in ...”

“... to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps ...”

“... return. At the Royal Academy, Majesty is a three-metre-high photograph of a tree overpainted in white gouache: she meticulously traced round each branch and twig. As a subject, it has its origin in Dean’s practice of collecting old postcards from flea markets around the world: in Japan once, she says, she kept inexplicably coming across images of the ...”

“... theories of natural law’, as Honour observes, but it cannot be considered so congenial to white philanthropists’ conviction of their superiority. Brotherhood – fraternité, – soon became an explosive word. Art and literature in the last decades of the 18th century and the first of the 19th – the first part of the period that Honour explores ...”