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“... and again on page four. This is surely how it should be. West Country villages – if we follow Thomas Hardy – have enough tragedy of their own, enough worry, without having to deal with the committal hearing of a Rosemary West, whose charge-sheet, if proved true, could make her the most gruesome female killer Britain has ever known. Those charges have of ...”

“... had done. Child’s Play 3 wasn’t the only story offered to provide a context for the killing: Andrew O’Hagan’s Diary in the LRB (11 March 1993), for example, provided a corrective to the point of view that Thompson and Venables were inhuman aberrations; even if the correspondence that followed soon retreated into an altercation about what Just ...”

“... nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary ...”

“... contrast to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, which arose from a sexual escapade, that of Andrew Johnson 130 years earlier involved some of the most intractable problems in American history. How should the nation be reunited after the Civil War? Who is entitled to American citizenship and the right to vote? What should be the status of the four ...”

“... among the rural poor under the name of Dr Cake? This scenario is both premise and précis of Andrew Motion’s novella, The Invention of Dr Cake. The action is the deduction of Dr Cake’s secret by the narrator, Dr Tabor. The book is presented in the form of documents supposedly written by Tabor and deposited in the archive of the Royal College of ...”

“... modern racisms, also a capitalist question, then the opposite has long been true as well.Listen to Andrew Liu discuss this piece with Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”

“... to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a Neoclassical rotunda with an eagle-like phoenix raising its strong wings. Below the cupola ...”

“... first thing we see propelling him towards the writing table is a disapproving, put-downy father, Thomas Stevenson, who had been bred by three hundred years of Presbyterian wisdom and several generations of success in the family business of lighthouse engineering to feel that Louis was merely a time-waster in a velvet jacket. That in itself might have been ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously ...”

“... inflexibility and his unfamiliarity with conditions in the far north were serious handicaps.’ Andrew Lambert, in his new biography of Franklin, an attempt to reclaim the explorer from both Victorian hagiography and subsequent disparagement, is less even-handed: ‘Whatever else had been achieved, Franklin had demonstrated a rare talent for ...”

“... by the small magazines, published by Eliot, anthologised by Yeats, and understood, alongside Dylan Thomas, to be one of the chief lyrical men of the age. Anaïs Nin, of all the spotters of seedy excellence, names him in her diaries as the sort of person who might put a pulse into a dull room: George Barker comes, with his dilated Celtic blue eyes, his ...”

“... to the local toffs. Eliot, who had come to see the village from which one of his ancestors – Andrew Eliot – may have set off for America in the 17th century, was indeed seeking to find a kinship with this still somewhat feudal community. Yet the next sentence of his letter makes it clear he was unsettled to find that the ‘cousin of mine’ in East ...”

“... Rubin, Wolff’s publisher, whose apartment it was, gave a speech but was heckled by the agent Andrew Wylie, who suggested that the contractual arrangements weren’t as simple as Rubin implied. A journalist from Vanity Fair had his pen and notepad out; Jared Hohlt, an editor from New York, was there to make sure his magazine wasn’t missing anything. No ...”

“... that way the previous October, at St Giles Circus, to see the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison, the first of the regicides, and he was no more pleased with the congestion then. Citizens in Restoration London were obsessed with the nearness of death, also with shaving minutes off everything you could shave minutes off, including crossing the ...”

“... and rancour. There is evidence that he enjoys walking, curlews, turtledoves, bullfinches, owls, Thomas Moore’s ‘Thee, Thee, Only Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my ...”