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“... neutralise its pain is very much Robertson’s thing. That has made him a very good translator of savage deaths and dismemberments in classical poetry. His output includes great brutal versions of the flaying of Marsyas (‘Hock to groin, groin to hock./That’s your inside leg done:/no more rutting for you, cunt’), and of Actaeon being torn apart by his ...”

“... allegories, the killer dog as an expression of the Revolution which is itself part of some sort of savage unconscious. Teffi must have been aware of similarly dark impulses on the rise in Europe: by 1936, when the story was written, some of her émigré Russian friends had started to flirt with fascism in the hope it would be an antidote to communism. In the ...”

“... a painted-over figure, presumably a self-portrait. The order is thought to be, from left to right, Anne, Emily, Charlotte. Hassall compiled her scene from different sources: Patrick’s profile, with his distinctive high neckerchief (worn, we are told, because of his fear of bronchitis), was copied from a photograph taken late in his life, when all his ...”

“... carried the glamour and danger of scandal and shame, Dean and a local girl in her late teens, Anne-Marie, become lovers. The photographer, who narrates and, as he breaks off to explain to the reader, invents the details of Dean and Anne-Marie’s sexual journey, nonetheless frames the story in terms of his own ...”

“... longshoremen and wondering who would buy the next round, and why. Even books are not safe. Lisa Anne Gurr combed through Simenon’s Maigret books to confirm that drinks indicate social class and that Maigret drinks a great deal of beer, brandy, wine and coffee; he has herb tea when ill. Anthropologists anxious to examine the habits of their fellow drinkers ...”

“... up for her session there was no answer to the doorbell. Later, she learned that her therapist, Anne Darquier, had killed herself. She did so not long after a television interviewer had discovered Louis Darquier de Pellepoix living in Franco’s Spain, unrepentant, even smug. That revelation, that her therapist was this monster’s daughter, whom he had ...”

“... He described conditions in Formby in a (hitherto unpublished) letter to Jane. It was ‘the most savage-looking establishment of human habitations, – I cannot call it village’, with its ‘green stagnant ditches and midden-holes’ and ‘without “lodging” in it that we could notice for anything bulkier than a rabbit’. As for the plight of poor ...”

“... Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story suggested that sycophantic royal biographies were out, and savage royal exposés were in. Hence the commissioning of a spate of Mortonesque knife-jobs. It was also supposed that what the Sun called the Queen’s bum year might be followed by an even worse year in 1993. This was naive. Like the practised survivors that ...”

“... problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the ...”

“... of fear, cruelty, malice, revenge, ambition, madness and folly, as would have disgraced the most savage nation in the most barbarous age’.The task Malthus set himself in writing the Essay on Population was to prove the existence of the natural law that radicals had ignored at such great cost. Drawing on his Newtonian training at Cambridge, he put this law ...”

“... of educational advantage and career opportunities over the past century and a half. Her mother, Anne Powell, came from a decidedly unintellectual background: Anne’s father, George Powell, was a lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards and briefly a Tory MP, while his wife was the daughter of a brewing family; ...”

“... for more. There is in fact not a really vicious character in the novel. The keeper Tom shoots the savage ape who is apparently attacking him (caught in a recognisably human situation, Percy is actually hastening to him as a friend), but is instrumental in saving Percy’s son. Gloria is a thief and a sniveller, but she applies her professional skills to ...”

“... more deeply. As Mailer wrote (it is one of the texts quoted near the close of Alvarez’s Savage God), ‘the private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.’ In the light of the assaults on Lennon and Reagan, it might be truer, today, to say that murder is the form in which America’s suicidal impulse has begun to express ...”

“... delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ A tiny poem, ‘The Thin Man’, in Justice’s second collection, Night Light ...”

“... mingling’. ‘Alida was hungry for realism. Most of her favourite books were non-fiction, like Anne Frank’s diary . . . books where stuff happened because there was no other way for it to happen, however much the author might have wanted it to happen differently.’ That said, she also has a weakness for Agatha Christie and Miss Marple’s fussy talent ...”